Widescreen TV from ATI HD4350

  • Thread starter Thread starter nandrews
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nandrews

I am having great difficult configuring my Dell PC with an HD4350 to
show correctly on my Panasonic 32in LCD TV. This was to be the main
purpose for buying this PC!
There are very limited choices of resolution.
Choosing the highest resolution, whilst within the max for the TV
actually looks worse than lower. But that is the only res' that will
give the correct 16:9 ratio!
At some lower resolution than that the TV display actually goes black!

Not connected, but an additional problem, is that Dell have advised me
that this PC has a problem with Panasonic TV's connected via HDMI.
They say I have to wait for a new BIOS update.!

Is there any easy guide to configuring the card, maybe with Caralyst?

Thanks

Nigel
 
nandrews said:
I am having great difficult configuring my Dell PC with an HD4350 to
show correctly on my Panasonic 32in LCD TV. This was to be the main
purpose for buying this PC!
There are very limited choices of resolution.
Choosing the highest resolution, whilst within the max for the TV
actually looks worse than lower. But that is the only res' that will
give the correct 16:9 ratio!
At some lower resolution than that the TV display actually goes black!

Not connected, but an additional problem, is that Dell have advised me
that this PC has a problem with Panasonic TV's connected via HDMI.
They say I have to wait for a new BIOS update.!

Is there any easy guide to configuring the card, maybe with Caralyst?

Thanks

Nigel
Click to expand...

I tried my 4870 on my 50" LG Plasma and it looked good at 1680x1050 to
me but I guess on LCD it is not quite the same. In Cat settings you can
choose custom HDTV resolutions, enable 1280x720 and try that, should
look fine at that res.
 
* nandrews:
I am having great difficult configuring my Dell PC with an HD4350 to
show correctly on my Panasonic 32in LCD TV. This was to be the main
purpose for buying this PC!
There are very limited choices of resolution.
Choosing the highest resolution, whilst within the max for the TV
actually looks worse than lower. But that is the only res' that will
give the correct 16:9 ratio!
At some lower resolution than that the TV display actually goes black!
Click to expand...

Maybe you could give away some more details? For example, since
Panasonic made more than a single model of 32in LCD TV the exact model
would be a start. Also, what is the native(the physical resolution of
the LCD panel, not the max resolution the TV can accept!) resolution of
your TV then? How is the PC connected (VGA, DVI, HDMI, Component, Y/C,
CVBS)?

Also, you have to switch off overscan in the TV's settings. Overscan
means that the TV zooms a bit into the image, and this means even if you
feed your TV at its native resolution the image won't be pixel-matched
and look awful.

Benjamin
 
Thanks to you both for your replies.

Elmer - I have just tried setting 1280x720 and the Panasonic screen
goes black! So it seems to be another res' which it doesn't support.
I would have tried your own 1680x1050 next, but as the Panasonic pixel
ratio is 1366 x 768 I don't think it will work.


Benjamin I thought I had given some of those details.

The Panasonic model is TX-32LXD80
The pixel ratio is 1366 x 768

The connecton I would prefer is HDMI, but as I said Dell have a
problem with that and say a BIOS upgrade is required to fix. So I am
presently connecting the Panasonic via a VGA adapter to the the DVI
socket and when necessary swapping that for the regular monitor
connected to the VGA socket, to recover the setting that worked.

I can get some resolutions to display, but they are all wrong for
16:9, so circles and heads look like squashed eggs (too wide!). All
except 1360x768 which as near as I can get to the Panasonic max and
have proper round circles. But then curiously the display is pretty
bad with fonts looking messy and colour fringes on some edges!

I don't seem to have any control of overscan, I assume from the TV
itself. The only settings on the PC connection are:-

Clock, H-pos, V-pos, Clock phase and Sync
R-Gain, G-Gain, B-Gain and Gamma

Does this give any more information that can help you diagnose?

Thanks

Nigel
 
* nandrews:
Benjamin I thought I had given some of those details.
Click to expand...

You didn't, otherwise I wouldn't ask.
The Panasonic model is TX-32LXD80
The pixel ratio is 1366 x 768
Click to expand...

Then this is the resolution you should use, or 1360x768 if this is
available, but nothing else. The TX-32LXD80 will take 1920x1080 but then
scales down to 1366x768 which impacts image quality as the pixels don't
match.
The connecton I would prefer is HDMI, but as I said Dell have a
problem with that and say a BIOS upgrade is required to fix.
Click to expand...

Can you try with another gfx card?
I can get some resolutions to display, but they are all wrong for
16:9, so circles and heads look like squashed eggs (too wide!). All
except 1360x768 which as near as I can get to the Panasonic max and
have proper round circles. But then curiously the display is pretty
bad with fonts looking messy and colour fringes on some edges!
Click to expand...

Did you disable overscan for the HDMI port? If not, the image won't be
pixel matched and therefore look like shit.
I don't seem to have any control of overscan, I assume from the TV
itself. The only settings on the PC connection are:-

Clock, H-pos, V-pos, Clock phase and Sync
R-Gain, G-Gain, B-Gain and Gamma
Click to expand...

These are settings for the analogue input. Have a look at the HDMI port.

Benjamin
 
nandrews said:
Thanks to you both for your replies.

Elmer - I have just tried setting 1280x720 and the Panasonic screen
goes black! So it seems to be another res' which it doesn't support.
I would have tried your own 1680x1050 next, but as the Panasonic pixel
ratio is 1366 x 768 I don't think it will work.
Click to expand...

Then try other 16:9 resolutions until you find one that is acceptable
and use 1:1 pixel mapping as the other person said. I had an LCD with
native res the same as yours and it gave me issues too but I was able to
use 1280x720 ok and that was fine for games. The res the manual said to
use with PC use was 1024x768 which is 4:3 ratio and looked like crap.
There is a utility you can buy/demo that allows you to set custom
timings and resolutions but I can't remember the name of it now. The
reason the screen went black at 1280x720 is a timing issue and not
because the TV can't be forced to do it. If your TV was 1920x1080 native
I expect you wouldn't have this issue.
 
Thanks once again for all of your input on my problem.
I will give them a long and hard look.

One thing that may change the situation is that I can now connect with
HDMI!
However it needs to be connected AFTER the PC has started booting!
Obviously not an ideal situation and Dell are still looking into the
problem.

But I can work with it and the PC recognises the TV and immediately
gave a proper formated display (with round circles)!
It intially was set as 720p and I have now changed it to 1080p.

I will look at all your suggestions and see how they will improve what
I have now.

Thanks once again for all of your helpful responses.

Nigel
 
* nandrews:
But I can work with it and the PC recognises the TV and immediately
gave a proper formated display (with round circles)!
It intially was set as 720p and I have now changed it to 1080p.
Click to expand...

Use the 720p resolution. Setting the resolution to 1080p on a 1366x768
TV brings you nothing, except that the image isn't pixel matching and
that the GPU has a higher load.

Benjamin
 
nandrews said:
Thanks once again for all of your input on my problem.
I will give them a long and hard look.

One thing that may change the situation is that I can now connect with
HDMI!
However it needs to be connected AFTER the PC has started booting!
Obviously not an ideal situation and Dell are still looking into the
problem.

But I can work with it and the PC recognises the TV and immediately
gave a proper formated display (with round circles)!
It intially was set as 720p and I have now changed it to 1080p.

I will look at all your suggestions and see how they will improve what
I have now.

Thanks once again for all of your helpful responses.

Nigel
Click to expand...

I connect my computer HDMI to my Denon receiver which then connects to
the LG 1920x1080 Plasma and I get sound and 1680x1050 video over the
HDMI connection perfectly.

I just remembered the name of that utiltiy. It's called Powerstrip by
Entech. Check it out.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/
 
Benjamin et al.

Thanks once again.

I see that setting 1080 when the native vertical res is only 768, but
that makes me wonder what the TV shows it is changing to 1080?

I had noticed some stepping in videos, both streamed and played from
DVD and hard disk. But there maybe many other reasons for that.
Hopefully if I run at 720p that will remove one of the reasons
excuses.

Thanks

Nigel
F.I.O Dell are coming to swap out the video card to try and cure the
boot failure when HDMI is connected,
 
* Elmer Fudd:
I connect my computer HDMI to my Denon receiver which then connects to
the LG 1920x1080 Plasma and I get sound and 1680x1050 video over the
HDMI connection perfectly.

I just remembered the name of that utiltiy. It's called Powerstrip by
Entech. Check it out.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/
Click to expand...

That only helps when the TV does actually support this resolution, and
even then is only necessary if the TV doesn't provide valid EDID
information (basically a list with what resolutions are supported) to
the gfx card.

Benjamin
 
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