Mac Mini, DisplayConfigX and Panasonic TH42PX60B
Something that’d been bugging me for a while is my Mac Mini’s connection to my Panasonic HDTV. I had been using a VGA cable to connect, which gives me the maximum resolution of 1024 × 768. Not that bad, but my TV’s resolution is also 1024 × 768, which means that the picture is stretched to 16:9 dimension and also looks like shit.
So, what to do? Well first off I purchased an IXOS DVI to HDMI cable (‘it’s all about the interconnects’). Instantly I had a better picture, outputting 1280 × 720 as it should.
However the default was with overscan on, which gave me no usable doc or menu bar as both were ‘off screen’. Switching overscan off gave me a nice black border around the whole screen of about an inch.
After investing in the cable, I’d thought that all my problems would be solved, but alas no – it was one of those situations where I thought ‘why do I have to mess with everything?’. And then DisplayConfigX came riding to my rescue.
When I say riding to my rescue, I mean ‘riding to my rescue by going round be scarborough’. When I say that it was frustrating to set up I mean it was frustrating to set up. Grrr.
Anyway, long story short (he says after about 300 words), I finally managed to get a setting that worked, with a huge slab of help from this post on the Whirlpool forums. It’s not perfect – there’s still some 4 pixels top and bottom missing, but movies (with the new “Quicktime fullscreen update” especially) and photos now look amazing.
Add that the fifty quid I spent on a proper wireless Mac keyboard and Mighty Mouse whilst in Chicago, and I can now ‘honestly’ say that I wont be tinkering with my Mini set up for a while.
Those settings in full:
- Horizontal (H) active – 1224
- H front porch – 136
- H Sync – 80
- H Back porch – 208
- Vertical (V) active – 688
- V front porch – 26
- V sync – 5
- V back porch – 32
As you can see the resulution that I ended up with is nothing like the standard high definition resolutions, but as I said, it works very well for me.