Panasonic overscan problems?

[fateicon]

Hi all,

I'm a first time HDTV buyer and this forum has been most helpful on hdmi, blu ray players, blu ray movie discussion, 720 vs 1080, plasma vs lcd(the general conseus seems to favor Plasma, so I'm leaning that way), and I'm narrowing down my choices. These Panasonic plasmas, the 50px80u and 42px80u seem good, but I keep stumbling upon something about overscan problems. People have said you can't turn it off on the 50". Does that mean I'd always be stuck with an image that was cropped in some way? If this is a problem on the 50px, is it widespread throughout that line and others from Panasonic?

If there is an overscan problem, what does it affect? I'm mainly going HD to watch blu ray.

I'm really looking for the best set $1000 or less that is between 42-50" and these Panny plasmas seem to fit the bill rather well, but, I also don't want to be stuck with something that has some kinda critical picture flaw. thanks

[allstar780]

i know on the PZ80 and 800 you can turn on a setting that eliminates overscan, i thought the PX80 had it as well

[plowmanjoe]

what is overscan?

[aramis109]

Originally Posted by plowmanjoe

what is overscan?

Overscan used to occur a lot on DLP and CRT sets to eliminate the ugly edges and to frame up the picture. It's basically meaning it zooms in the whole picture a few pixels so that the border looks nice and neat. You can usually test this with the test pattern that comes on all Sony BD's or with most HD calibration discs.

Of course, with HD media and movies, you don't really want overscan. I would think that most sets have a setting to output just what they're given without any kind of post-processing.

[My_Two_Cents]

I've never heard of any problems, let alone widespread problems. I've got 3 Pany plasmas, and I don't see an issue with any of them.

[fateicon]

I just stumbled onto a thread on some other forum via google which discussed not being able to turn the overscan off on the 50" of this Panny series.

here's another thread I just found:

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthr...readid=1063132

the person stating the overscan can't be removed seems to be debunked, what does everyone think?

[fly4rabbi]

Mine doesn't have this problem. I have the 50pz80u and when I watch bd's Ihave nice black borders on the top and bottem. Some digital channels that are not shot in wide screen have a nice black border on the left and right. I can zoom in but then i lose part of the pick so I will stick w/ the bars

[maygit]

You can still have an overscan problem even if you have the bars on movies, u'll just be losing some of the picture on the sides that you may not have noticed. The only way to REALLY know if your having an overscan issue is with a calibration disc. I have bars on my SXRD KDS55A2000 and when i ran the scan i found out that i have about a 2.5% overscan issue which really isn't bad at all. I think most tv's with this issue average around 5%.

Here's what tests will generally look like:
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b1..._overscan2.png