panasonic 42" plasma HDMI

I have a Panasonic 60" LCD Projection with a resolution of 1280 x 720 connected to my Mini via DVI. At the 1280 x 720 resolution there is plenty of overscan which prevents me from seeing all but the bottom of the menubar, the bottom half of my dock and the side edges of the screen. I'm so unhappy about it I'm considering getting a new TV.

It's unfortunate there is no easy way to tweak the settings on the Mini or the TV because it is barely usable like this and not at all what I had expected.

I've tried DisplayConfigX and some othe rresolution adjuster, but neither of them are for the average guy. Maybe if I was an expert at displays or willing to trial and error for 2 days straight I'd figure it out...

Dan/J Cobb: I tried the mini with my vanilla TV yesterday (disappointing image quality). Like you, I also found the top and bottom of the screen disappearing when I played with the Displays preference.

Have you tried a restat? That fixed the problem of size for me. (Can you tell me about quality/text readability on these plasma screens?)

I tried with my 42" panny plasma to no avail. I couldn't get rid of the overscan so I just use the VGA instead. It looks great with VGA.

I tried the HDMI this weekend on my Panny 50". I was unable to get it to work. I'm glad I didn't order the HDMI switch box. I am using the VGA port on the front and the picture looks great. I'm not too happy about having to leave the flap up in the front. I'm not buying another TV so I'll put up with it and my wife could care less 🙂

When I got my mini, I connected it to my 46" Sony RPTV whoch does 1080i. I also had overscan problems and after investigating, I decided it wasn't worth the hassle. While you may be able to use one of the display utilities, you will most likely have to adjust your TV's height/width to get the picture on screen.

I was shooting for 1080i on the Sony using DVI (basically HDMI minus sound and a bigger connector). The image quality was atrocious. Text is to small to read, and the screen flicker was more than I wanted to deal with. Lower resolutions were better, but the overscan clinched it.

Oddly enough, HDTV at 1080i on the Sony looks fabulous.

It was OK for watching DVDs, but not acceptable as a monitor. I don't have a plasma, so I can't speak to that, but I believe that pic quality will be related to the native resolution of your display (overscan issues aside).

Anyways, I purchased a 1920x1200 LCD to use with the mini. If you have good luck with the plasma, I'd be interested to hear about it. Good luck.

I have a TH-50PX20 and cannot get the HDMI/DVI port to work properly.

I'm a bit confused as I thought the HDMI had built in resolution adjustment. The Mini detects my 50" model perfectly, but the overscan makes it look horrible. Switching it to PC VGA and adjusting to 1366 seems to be a bit better.

The Panasonic 50" is strange with regards to video inputs. Turn on the PC Menu and look at how clear the config menu is, but the input from the Mac looks like crap.

What a pain! This is my first Mac in about 9 years. I hope someone figures out how to get the picture smoother or I may decide to send my Mini back.

Dan - the panasonic (in my case testing the one at work) th42px25u will work with the mac mini using the a standard dvi to hdmi cable. If you are experiencing overscan, you can go into the panasonic service menu and adjust the settiings there - it works pretty well to position everything on the screen correctly. The other problem ....being that the VGA port on the front of the plasma displays clearer (test) than using the hdmi port. For this I have not yet found a totally acceptable solution. Using the VGA port displays a crystal clear image (which I believe is (720p). Yet using the hdmi port is not horrible, but is certainly not as clear as the vga port. I've tried researching the solution "to death" and i cannot seem to find anyone who knows enough about video in general or about the panasonic model specicially to be of any great assistance. Display Config X and Switchres yield only minor positive gains. I know this is possible because other people have reported success in connecting via hdmi - so I really don't know what I could be doing wrong. Incidentally, its the same problem when connect a Windows PC to the unit....and the unit is not defective in any way. Can anyone shed any light on this??

So cruised through best buy one evening with my 17" Powerbook, and they were kind enough to allow me to hook up to any of their DLP tv's with digital inputs. I found all of the screens with DVI in or VGA in (via apple's DVI to VGA adaptor) worked great. any attempt to use an adaptor for DVI to HDMI all had overscann issues. This was a similar issue when I used a scan rate convertor by Audio Authority. I'm guessing it is upsampling the image and that is why overscan issue are around. I think this issue need sto be revisited when either we can test a suitable DVI-HDMI scan rate converter or wait until we have HDMI out for video cards.

Currently I have a 27" (16:9) LCD TV. It has DVI, VGA and Component in. The DVI seems to be limited to 1024 pixels wide (as covered in the documentation), now is I use the VGA connector I can get 1280x720 resotion (as covered in the documentation) and the text looks fantastic!

Nopw if I have this right, I'm right at the maximum capabilities of eth screen, so even if I use a computer with a better video card I still should be limited to the results.

Last night I got a panasonic 50" lcd-projection. I, too, have the overscan with dvi-hdmi @ 1280x720. Is the general consensus to use DisplayConfigX to adjust the video timings or the monitor service menu? If I were to adjust the 720p display parameters through the service menu, would that affect 720p HD content from my cable service?

Scott
I tried my Mini w/ my Panny 6UY via VGA. For some reason, the picture goes in and out, as if it loses sync. Via DVI it works fine. Did you do anything to the VGA setting on the plasma? This is buggin me...

I can tell you that in the hours I've spent tweaking DisplayConfigX I have been unable to find settings that completely work. I've gotten the top and the right to look good but cannot get the left and bottom perfect.
Tiger apparently has an overscan adjustment option, so I'm hoping that fixes it when I get around to updating my Mini.

I'm hoping I can get some good nuggest from the folks on this thread. It's looking like trying to use HDMI inputs is very dicey. Dan Morris1, did you end up going the VGA route on your Panasonic Plasma? Like you, I was trying to avoid that because of it being on the front input panel...

Here is my post
Matt Wilkinson1, "Need guidance for my Mac Mini project (sorry, long-ish post)", 02:08pm Jul 12, 2005 CDT

Thx everybody.

MWW