Why is my TV screen appearing curved (on top and bottom)? Graphics card?

[guitrldy]

I noticed that the display on my TV, either in Windows or SS, is curved on the top and bottom... like an hourglass on it's side.


Would this be an issue with my graphics card/drivers or is this just how Windows looks on a television set?

Thanks!
PS. Not as pronounced as an actual hourglass, mind you. I can watch TV and it looks great.

[RobertH]

yeah tv encoders usually have this problem (mine comes out with straight sides but the picture is tilted on the center of the screen like a parallagram at about 3degrees), one solution is to use the overscan feature of your video card to stretch the image larger than the tv screen displays (normal tv goes off the screen on all 4 sides so you dont notice this phenominon)
but when using overscan some parts of the user interface tend to fall of the screen

[V_D_O]

It could also be the TV - my old TV used to curve the picture terribly on one corner. I noticed this more on the computer picture than on the broadcast signal because of the fact that the broadcast signal was stretched past the borders. Once I switched to a flat screen TV, I no longer have any problems.

[mrphil]

And a lot of older CRT TV's can make the pciture go slightly bigger or smaller in areas of the screen based oln how much luminence there is in the signal. A bright white screen generally ends up with being larger and more curvature than a dark or black screen. this is much less of an issue on very new TV's where the signal processing is digital.

[guitrldy]

I found some new info on the problems me (and others) are having with TV Displays and black borders.

It appears that NVidia cards TV Out stinks....

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/...rce-ti-05.html

Time to look at ATI. Any suggestions? Anyone have an ATI card that gives them a full TV viewing screen with no black borders, curvature and the like?

Thanks!

[RobertH]

the only way to remove the black bars (wich you can do on an nvidia card) is to enable something called overscan, this basically makes the picture bigger than the screen but WILL cut off portion of the screen, since the computer doesnt display in the actual resolution the tv uses (dont even know if you can call it a resolution) those black bars are present so that you can see the entire computer screen, nvidia offers a "cinema" tv out mode that runs the tv out at 720x480 wich matches the tv really well but since the true fullscreen only offers 640 and 800 you cant really do much with it. if you enable overscan on any card until SS gets around to modifying the GUI for overscan part of the interface will get cut off