Fix mah fuzzies!

February 22, 2010 8:00 AM

Yesterday I attached my PC to my TV. Across the display, there are barely-noticeable vertical strips of fuzziness...or inconsistency in the resolution. It's annoying the crap out of me and I don't know how to fix it.

The PC is a custom-ordered job sporting a Geforce 7900GT video card and plenty of RAM. The TV is a Olevia 32" widescreen. I'm running at 1380x768.

Everything is working fine and dandy...I even played some TF2 while sitting on the couch. But when I am viewing pages with lots of text - documents and certain web pages, it's obvious that there are vertical strips across the screen where the text is fuzzier than in adjacent areas. Like the resolution is not consistent across the entire screen. And if I slide the document across the screen, it's clear that these areas are fixed - I can see the text slide through areas of fuzziness.

I poked through the display options but I can't seem to find anything that helps. Hope me metafilter!

posted by gnutron to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Ok. IANAtv expert, but I know this from my recent experiments with my new Samsung 32" lcd tv.

1. I've seen this happen as a result of bad physical cable type.
2. I've seen this happen using different types of cable (i.e. you connect displayport or hdmi to tv, it looks fine. You connect VGA or DVI, wtf? etc).
3. Sometimes simply the screen resolution you select - even if it's supposed to be the native resolution - doesn't look right.
4. (rarely, for me) drivers.
5. EMI


WHY does this occur? No idea. Bad tv? Bad video card? Hw that doesn't place nice with other hw? Cosmic rays? It's a toss up, but it's got to be one of those if it's not either a display option, or a combination of things.
posted by bitterkitten at 8:13 AM on February 22, 2010

Try 1366x768.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:14 AM on February 22, 2010

Best answer: This happens when the rows of pixels in the picture to be displayed don't exactly line up with the rows of pixels on the display panel itself. A couple of things can cause this:

• Picture resolution doesn't match panel resolution (can you set your PC to display a 720-line picture instead of 768?)
• "Overscan" scaling the picture up so that it's slightly larger than the panel (cutting off the edges), so even though you think it should exactly match the panel resolution, it no longer matches after being scaled up a bit. Sometimes setting that input to "PC" mode, or using the aspect ratio controls to find the one that doesn't have any overscan, will fix it.

posted by FishBike at 8:20 AM on February 22, 2010

Ah, I just saw that you said vertical strips of fuzziness... so this means it's the horizontal resolution that isn't matching the panel. So you probably want 1280x something instead of 1380, and turn off any overscanning that might be going on.
posted by FishBike at 8:22 AM on February 22, 2010

If you're connecting via VGA, find your TV's "automatic" adjustment option and select it. (Monitors have the same function.)

It will align the picture to the screen and reduce fuzziness to a minimum.
posted by Mwongozi at 8:26 AM on February 22, 2010

Response by poster: FishBike FTW! I spent so much time fidgeting with the computer that I forgot to mess with the TV's display settings. Changing the aspect setting from 'Full Screen' to '1:1 Mode' solves the problem with literally the press of a button. Thankis!
posted by gnutron at 8:29 AM on February 22, 2010

I get this if the monitor's using a lower frequency than the card can support. If you go into advanced display properties, upping the frequency may fix it. That's maybe what your 1:1 mode setting did.
posted by scruss at 10:01 AM on February 22, 2010