[alsutton]

I've got a Philips 42pf5521d/10 1080i Plasma (Details here ), and a Philips 5960/05 DVD Player which can upscale to 1080i (Details here ).

When I connect the DVD player to the TV using HDMI and tell the DVD player to upscale to 1080i I get severe letterboxing (about 1/3 to 1/2 of the screen is in use, the rest is black bars).

Does anyone have any experience or tips for maximising the picture size without cropping the picture?

[meltcity]

Is the aspect ratio correct, i.e. do people look short and fat when viewed over HDMI?

Black bars are normal on DVD movies with an aspect ratio of 2:35:1 (21:9). You should expect 25% of the screen to be occupied by black bars when viewing them in their correct ratio on a 16:9 screen. Films with a 1:85:1 ratio should very nearly fill the screen but not quite (it varies with overscan). You can check aspect ratios on the back of the DVD packaging.

[soulboy77]

So have you tried just outputting at 576p from the DVD player to let the TV do all the upscaling to see if there is any difference?

[alsutton]

Thanks for the tips. I've found the following;

One of the default settings for the DVD player is to output 4:3 , Changing this to output 16:9 increase the amount of screen used significantly.

Outputting 1080i results in larger black bars than using 576p (thanks for the tip soulboy77)

2.35:1 & 2.40:1 give black bars when outputting a 576p signal, 1.80:1 with 576p uses the full screen (thanks meltcity).

So if anyone else has this combination it looks like it's a good idea to check the output aspect ratio & let the TV do any picture upscaling by setting the HDMI output to 576p.

Thanks again for the help.