Having an issue, Laptop--HDMI--LCD TV

[balane]

Seems simple enough. Got a 1080P 24" LCD television for my office. Going to be primarily just for watching FIOS TV through Verizon's Motorola tuner.

No problem so far, everything is great.

Sometimes I may wish to use my laptop on this screen. For whatever reason, kid wants to play WoW, wife wants to watch some downloaded TV show torrent, etc. Just a simple HDMI cable between laptop and TV. Whenever I do this I direct all the sound and all the video to the HDMI output. The laptop itself no longer provides any image or audio content as all of it is directed to the television.

Great.

Problem is, when I set the laptop's resolution to 1920x1080 (Which windows shows as the highest available while connected to the TV.) The computer desktop is clearly larger than the TV screen is displaying. I can see the top edge of the task bar and just the edges of any icons that happen to be on the desktop but along the left or right edges.

It seems as if the TV is only showing something like 1800x900 (That's just a guestimate.)

If I slide the resolution down to anything lower everything acts as it should.

Just for a test I took a screen capture from the laptop and when I opened it up from the clipboard in a photo editor the desktop is actually 1920x1080 as it should be.

It seems as if my TV is almost, but not quite, true 1080P in resolution but of course, that's silly.

Any ideas?

CLIFF NOTES: Lining my laptop into my 1080P LCD TV via HDMI the desktop appears too large for the television's display when set to 1920x1080.

Thanks.

 

[MTDEW]

Most likely you just need to adjust the scaling options in your video cards settings.
Do you know what video card your laptop has?

 

[balane]

It's an HP ION based netbook. I have the latest nVidia drivers installed.

Scaling, eh? I didn't think that would be necessary since I'm using an all digital connection.

 

[Throckmorton]

It sounds like the TV is cropping the image, then resizing it back up to its 1920x1080 resolution. It's stupid but cheap TVs tend to do it, solely because it used to be required for NTSC. You'll have to look through your menus for a per-pixel or 1:1 option. There are other names for it.

If the TV has no option for that, you'll have to get a different TV. What model is it?

 

[balane]

That seems like a logical explanation and that description is exactly what's happening on the screen. Looks like I'm stuck with it because the menu is pretty limited.

It's a dirt cheap TV, brand name is Element. Got it at Target on sale for less than $200 The picture is decent and it's a third string TV set around here, replacing a 14" CRT that is 20 years old.

Oh well, 720P will have to do for the computer.

Thanks for the info.

 

[nebbiin]

I realize this may not help very many people, but my wife's new laptop had this same problem with our old dynex tv. it's an hp spectre b0000 with windows 7, this is what i did to fix the problem.

1. right click the desktop
2. click on "screen resolution"
3. click the blue link for "advanced settings"
4. click on the large "intel graphics and media control panel" tab
5. from the scaling drop down select "customize aspect ratio"

I had to set the vertical and horizontal settings to 60 to fit the image fully onto the tv screen.

 

[Red_Lambo]

Nebbiin's comment above worked for me. Thanks for the suggestion.