Plugging laptop into a TV, screen size isn’t right?

If I plug my laptop into the TV in the conservatory paincave the TV doesn’t display the edges of the screen. It cuts it off about 2/3 of the way up the taskbar, and across the first columns of icons on the desktop. Which is a PITA with Sufferfest as it won’t let you shrink the window below a certain size so ends up cutting off part of the screen even if you don’t go fullscreen.

TV is an ancient Pioneer plasma that we got free 3rd hand, and AFAIK I can’t find any setting that lets you adjust the zoom/positioning of the image, beyond the usual 4:3, zoom, etc. the entire menu system has very few settings you can actually change. Changing the laptop resolution doesn’t help either, the TV just scales it to fit with this missing 1″ around the edge.

Is there any way to force the laptop (windows 10, intel graphics) to output a ~20 pixel black band around the edge? I’ve tried setting it up as a monitor and as a TV, neither seems to make any difference.

Look for an overscan setting on the TV and either enable or disable it. Had to Google on my TV as Samsung gave it a random name instead of overscan.

Is there any display input options on the TV menu? Sounds like it might be something to do with 1:1 pixel mapping or the like…

Look for an overscan setting on the TV

Yea, overscan is the problem, couldn’t see any options that described it though which was the issue.

Is there any display input options on the TV menu? Sounds like it might be something to do with 1:1 pixel mapping or the like…

Oddly it does it with the laptop outputting 1366 x 768 or 1280 x 720, it’s like it’s assuming it’s a 768 line frame and only displaying 720 of them., but somehow processing the 720 upto 768 then cropping it.

On some TVs the overscan settings only show up if you change the input type to PC (it looks like you’re only changing the icon, but it affects a lot of stuff in the TV)

Yup. Bit of a punt as models may differ but try:

Option / HDMI Input / Signal Type = PC

Yeah I had similar and I concluded it was overscan.

the solution was to change the aspect ratio control on the TV from 4:3, 16:9 Widescreen, Letterbox, Cinema, etc. to Auto.

Simple but fixed it for us.

On 2 Samsung’s I’ve had HDMI 1 over scans with no apparent way to turn it of but the other HDMI inputs don’t.

Picture size and positioning control is something you tend to find lacking on cheaper screens.

One other potential thing to try, in the graphics card driver settings you might have a doobery widjet like this…

https://www.flickr.com/gp/186296265@N03/83bD9M

How are you connecting? My Apple TV is similar for zwift, ancient Sony lcd and overscan modes only work on dvi/pc inputs. The hdmi has it disabled. If you’re coming out of a laptop and you’re using hdmi, try a dvi or vga cable if you’ve got one.

Tried everything and nothing works properly.

The closest setting I can find is to set the tv screen to “centered” rather than wide/zoom/4.3, then go down the list of laptop resolutions untill it fits. Seems like the screen is just a bit short of 1080 lines, more like 1000. Irritatingly the laptop cant quite match it, so its either cutting off a bit of the clock or much smaller in the middle of the screen.

It’ll do.

And being a plasma it kicks out a lot of heat so should be nice to pre-warm the room on cold mornings 😂

I’ll see if i can find a vga cable and see if that works.

Thanks for the suggestions all.