I need help with PC on LCD TV Okay, here's what's happening...
I just got a Westinghouse 27" 27w7 LCD TV.
Main use is for living room TV and secondary use will be for my PC, which I plan to browse the net, play games, play DVDs through the PC, etc.
My problem is that while running my PC to the LCD works great while using VGA, when I use DVI/HDMI I get a very strange image. The text seems somewhat garbaled and the color seem really saturated.
The native resolution on the TV is 1366x768 (is this normal? why not 1280x720?) and when running VGA at native resolution I get a great 1:1 pixel image... I can also run 1280x720 with VGA and it looks fine, just not as clear as running native.
Running any resolution, including the seemingly supported 1280x720 with HDMI seems to just look messy... garbaled and strange.
I'm using a pretty cheap DVI -> HDMI cable I got at radio shack... could this be related to the problem?
Should running DVI -> HDMI at 1280x720 work perfectly fine?
Could it be my video card?
My TV?
Software?
I'm not sure what else to try, I really want to get this to look good on HDMI because it's a better image if it works... that and I use the PC for DVDs and the TV also doesn't support PIP if I use VGA instead of HDMI.
What would cause the HDMI image to look so crappy?
1366x768 is WXGA standard resolution and is perfectly fine.
I have a Olevia 26" LCD 1366x768, DVI-DVI connected to an ATI Radeon X-300 PCIE card, works perfectly at 1280x1024.
I also have a Panasonic 42" LCD 1280x720 , HDMI-DVI connected to an ATI Radeon AGP 8x 9550 , also works great provided using the latest Catalyst driver that supports HDTV compatible resolutions.
I use cheap cables from buy.com, both cost below $20. Work great.
VGA is the true PC input and guaranteed to work, but it is not as sharp as DVI. I suggest changing the video card, cost about $60 bugs with 256MB of memory.
Jeff I have had the same experience with a 50" Philips Plasma using a DVI-HDMI cable and a bunch of different video cards. I have used several cards form a hundred bucks to over $600 and they all look like crap. Strange lines on the sides of the screen, garbled picture, and I have not even gotten close to the native resolution of the screen.
I was a clients house with a 60" Plasma and it looked great. They were using a VGA to RGBHV cable and the look was amazing. I am going to try that next.