Little help?: I'm losing picture due to cropping (1 Viewer)

[RobertWW]

Hey. I wasn't sure where to post this, so here it is. I've noticed something kinda strange recently when watching some dvd's. Like many of you, I always choose widescreen dvd's over pan&scan, even though I'm watching them on a 4:3 screen. Well I noticed today while playing around with the zoom feature on my dvd player, that small portions of the left and right of the image are getting cut off when I watch the film normally. I can only see them when I zoom in and move all the way to the left or right. I checked it out on a few different TV's and DVD players, and the same thing happens each time. And just to clarify, this ISN'T a case of me having my dvd player set to 16:9 mode or anything. The films appear properly and without distortion, and the amount of image being lost is really really small. I should point out that all my dvd players are pioneer, so I don't know if that means anything. And when I tried playing the discs in my pc, I don't lose any of the image.

Can anyone give me any info on this, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.

 

[Dheiner]

It's called "overscan". All TVs have it, I think, except maybe some projectors. It's adjustable, if you want to/can cet to your menus. Do a search.

 

[RobertWW]

I tried checking around in the menus. Can't seem to find any way to turn it off. Thanks for the info.

 

[Allan Jayne]

The controls are probably labeled "height", "width", "vsiz", "hsiz", or something like that. You may have to access a "service menu" which in turn could void your warranty or cause other complications such as bowing of lines or misconvergence. These controls might also be only in the form of screwdriver adjustments in the back. Your computer monitor probably has these controls also, but much more easily accessible where you can experiment to see what is going to happen. On the computer monitor these controls are often labeled with two headed arrows sidewise (width) or upright (height).

Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm

 

[Michael Reuben]

The menu that will have these settings is typically called a service menu, and it's not meant to be accessible to the user. If you do find out how to access it, remember that it's intended for professionals. If you don't know what you're doing, you can mess up your image pretty badly. Write down the values of all settings in the service menu before attempting any adjustments.

If you're losing 5% of the image or less, I'd leave it alone. There are reasons why TV sets include overscan, and if you were to eliminate it entirely, you'd see a lot of raggedy edges and noise on many TV broadcasts.

M.