1920x1080 displays wrong aspect ratio

[19ninety]

1920x1080 HDTV displays wrong aspect ratio

so last week I was playing round with using my old rig as a HTPC. I hooked it up to my HDTV, turned it on, everything was just dandy, went to display options there was the option for 1920x1080. I selected it, hit apply and bingo, perfect picture. got my audio leads sorted today, came home, plugged them in, also a new vga lead. booted the system up and the tv gave a error saying cannot display. so plugged into a lcd a reset resolution to 800x600, the max was 1768x992 (??????) which is why it was out of range!
plugged back into tv, now i have a picture, but no option in control panel for 1920 res.
installed newest drivers, still the same. manually set the res to 1920x1080@60hz and i get a picture but its in the wrong aspect ratio - looks like 4:3 but the tv is set to 16:9. no scaling or aspect ratio options in nvidia control panel (186.18 drivers). I try 1920x1200, this displays almost the correct aspect ratio on the hdtv (a little to wide for the screen) but isnt 1 to 1 pixels and looks poop.

System spec is :
Vista Ultimate (thinking about installing an xp tomorrow)
E6300
7300GS [1920x1080 support tested and worked last week]
2gb corasir XMS2
AS Rock Conroe1333-GLAN)
Samsung HDTV (LE40A656A1)

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I've been looking forward to this all week only for it to go wrong at the last minute!!!
Thanks in advance

19

 

[flip]

You mention using a new VGA lead, what cable were you using before?

Have you tried using the old cable again?

Some TV's VGA will not accept the full 1080 resolution, could you use a DVI or HDMI option instead?

fliP.

 

[wij]

On your Samsung you should have an option on the aspect ratio setting page for "just scan" I found this is what I needed to set it to so my TV would work correctly with my Laptop connected via HDMI @ 1080.

 

[19ninety]

wij: I looked in the settings, but everything is greyed out except the 4:3 and 16:9 option.

flip: I might pop out in a bit and see if I can get a DVI to HDMI lead - maybe that will work?

Just seems a bit odd it worked last week and now it doesnt *insert very annoyed face*.

If getting a cable doesnt fix this then I'm gonna put the old system back in the loft and get a WD TV media player.

 

[wij]

Try naming the input to PC that sometimes enables some extra settings.

I hadn't read the OP correctly and didn't realise you were using VGA instead of DVI. If you can get a DVI-HDMI connection that will probably be better. Likely to get better picture quality out of it too as I found the VGA input on my Samsung to be a bit lacking compared to the HDMI's.

 

[alex24]

Definitely get yourself a DVI-HDMI cable, VGA doesn't support high resolutions on my TV at least, plus I find the digital picture quality to be much superior, as well as full 1080p being available.