Riddled TV Repair Forum

W3bbo · Joined: 03 Jun 2010 Posts: 3 Location: UK

Hi there,

I have a 4-month old Sony Bravia KDL-37S500 TV set up in my living room and I'm wanting to connect my Sony Vaio laptop to it to watch films, YouTube, that kind of thing.

My laptop has a 1920x1080 native resolution and sports HDMI out, so I used the HDMI cable that came with one of my desktop monitors to connect my laptop to the TV.

That works fine, the TV shows what's on my laptop screen, except it's got overscan: cutting off the edges of the image and then stretching it, which defeats the whole point of a 1080p display. No matter what resolution I run at (e.g. 1280x720) it applies overscan.

On comparable Sony Bravia models there is an Overscan option on the Features menu, however it is absent from my menu. There is no mention of overscan adjustment in the manual either.

I read that some people suspect that there might be an overscan option in the Service Menu, so I then went searching for Service Menu commands, however none of them work.

Can I disable overscan on my TV?
If so, is this done via the Service Menu?
And if that's so, how do I access the service menu?

Thanks

Google

JTS1957 · Joined: 21 Jan 2009 Posts: 2393 Location: Far, Far Away

You would think that Sony would be the one to answer this question.
Maybe even the salesperson who sells them might know. Neutral

W3bbo · Joined: 03 Jun 2010 Posts: 3 Location: UK

I'm beginning to wonder if the issue might be with nVidia rather than Sony. When I configure my computer to send a smaller resolution, e.g. 800x600 or 1280x1024 then it displays fine on the TV and the option to Stretch or display 1:1 is there.

But when I choose 1280x720 or 1920x1080, or anything above 1400 pixels wide then the TV reports that the input signal is "1080p" even if the actual resolution selected is anything but.

I have some high-end desktop monitors that have HDMI inputs which I know I can trust not to mess the picture up, so I'll give them a go later and report back my findings.

W3bbo · Joined: 03 Jun 2010 Posts: 3 Location: UK

I connected my laptop to one of my HDMI-capable monitors and they were able to display the image perfectly. My monitors have HDMI-scaling features listed on the menu (but they don't for DVI, curiously) and whilst they scaled-to-fit the image initially, the 1:1 version displayed fine and there was no overscan.

Therefore I can only conclude the problem is with the TV and not my laptop nor NVidia drivers.

I read that someone contacted Sony about this issue on a similar TV model, and they just told them to use VGA instead (so much for HDCP and pure-digital connections, oh and audio too).

I know the TV displays VGA fine, but I wasn't able to try out a 1920x1080 signal because my last laptop didn't offer it as an option. I don't have a VGA cable with me right now either.

I'll post a reply in this thread when/if I get a response from Sony. This has got to be a major issue because this would surely affect things like games consoles, TV tuners, and other devices.