Hooking a laptop up to a Samsung HD television

Right now I have my laptop connected to my new Samsung HD television via an SVGA cable. You may ask me “Why would you want to do that?” Well, … ummm…. I know there has to be a good reason for this… Hey, I know I could watch those videos that I downloaded but won’t stream through the XBOX.

It works pretty good, but I did have a few problems out of the box. Here is how I fixed them.

First of all, you must be using the right resolution. If you don’t, the TV may show an image but something will be off. In my case, the right screen resolution is 800×600. I don’t have one of those new schmancy 1080P screens, but it looks pretty good!

When I had the resolution set to 1026×768 I got some strange strobing and the entire screen wasn’t displayed.

The second step I had to do was to go into the menu of the television and have it sync up to the signal. When I first plugged the computer into the tv, I got a signal, but it wasn’t aligned right on the screen. I did the sync step and the image was aligned, but I was getting the strobe…thus the whole resolution thing.

I have one remaining problem and that is how to get the image into native 16×9. If I use the 16×9 setting on the TV, it stretches and distorts the image. (My laptop is sending a 4×3 image.)

I went online to look to see if the drivers for the video card in this laptop have been updated, but alas the latest drivers were from 2004, before the crush of 16×9 monitors on the market. My video card assumes that the only monitor it would ever be hooked up to is a standard 4×3…drats!!!

That means if I want to watch a movie from my laptop on my schmancy HDTV, I will have both letterboxing and pillars. If you don’t know what that means, do a Google search…well let me save you the trouble. Simply put, it means that I have a big black square surrounding my video content….again drats!!!

With a quick upgrade of my laptop, I should be in business. And since I am swimming in an ocean of money, that shouldn’t be a problem….wait…..DRATS!!!

Oh well, at least I have a schnazzy new monitor to look at www.murdog.com.

By the way, even I am getting sick of the ‘sch…’ thing. I believe I will stop that now!