Anyone up for a little experiment?

[DaveCoup]

I'm looking specifically for anyone with Comcast HD and hopefully someone with a 16:9 Mitsubishi and someone with another brand.

Anyway, if you're up for it, I can use your help because I can't get a straight answer. I'm gonna assume that most of the Comcast boxes out there are like mine (I have a Motorola 5100) and have a coax output as well as the component out. If you could take the time to throw a smaller TV on top of your PTV and hook it up to the coax out and check out the following...

the smaller set hooked up to the coax out will show the HD channels in a widescreen format with bars top and bottom. Take a minute or two and compare the top and bottom of the picture with what you see on your PTV. On my set I am losing the top couple of inches of the picture (no, no adjustment in the service menu will correct this as far as I can tell)....I had Comcast replace my box and that didn't solve it. I also had a service guy out and he adjusted it a bit but still couldn't correct the problem. As I assumed, he (Mitsubishi) blamed the problem on the broadcast. Of course, it could NEVER be their wonderful TV!! Anyway, I'd love to know if anyone else has this issue and hooking up the other set will make it easy to tell.

Thanks in advance.

-dave

ps....my HD is USELESS until COMCAST picks up MSG HD
although ESPN will help...

[57U]

Whenever you have an image that completely fills a 16:9 screen from top to bottom, there will be something missing when you compare it to the same image when it doesn't fill the screen. This is called overscan.

It sounds as though you may have a little too much of it on your TV and also, the STB may exacerbate the situation.

You can check your overscan on the TV with AVIA - they have an overscan test pattern that shows the amount of overscan. Most sets have about 4-6%. A "bad" set would have 10%.

I have adjusted the overscan on my Hitachi. I've got it at about 2% vertically and 4% horizontally - this allowed me to use my favourite stretch mode and still see what I wanted to in terms of "tickers", scores, clocks, etc on sporting events (the stretch mode used to lose me about 1" top and bottom and it no longer does).

(I never had any problem on HD like some of the people reported on this forum when they watched the football games and the score/clock was off the screen.) Based on comments so far, I have not narrowed down whether that's the TV (to some extent probably) or the STB (to some extent probably)

Perhaps we need to do a survey, but there are a lot of variables - type of STB, manufacturer, TV manufacturer, etc.

Anyway, using AVIA you'll be able to tell how much overscan there is on the TV and if it's more than 5-6%, you should be able to have that "fixed".

Good Luck. Hope this feedback was helpful.

BTW, when I did my vertical and horizontal size adjustment, I had to completely redo the convergence and a few other service menu items, since they were thrown off. Perhaps that's why the service people don't like to adjust size....