Liver&Onions

I just picked up the Toshiba 27AF41 this weekend. Initially I was leaning
towards the Samsung TXL2791, but after hearing about reliability, the TOshiba
sounded much better, even if it didn't offer the enhanced mode. It has 2
S-video, 3 AV, and one Colorstream(component) input. And I have not
looked back.

Upon setup, the TV looked great in TV mode... the lines seemed straight, and
the colors were nice, but needed some tweaking. I brought the contrast down
to about 45, and the sharpness way down to about 15. I don;t remember what I
set the color at but it changed too. Then I popped in a DVD to check how
that looked, I used the title sequence of FIght CLub, and it looked
sweet...except for one glitch.

When the THX logo came up in it's little blue box, I noticed the corners were
leaning out towards the outside of the set... crappy indeed. And no regular
tweaking could straighten them out...hence the service menu**

To get to the service menu on the AF41's,
1. Press and release mute on your remote
2. Press and hold mute on your remote
3. Press the Menu button on the TV itself ( A 'S' will appear on the screen)
4. Let go of the mute button and press Menu on the TV again.
5. After making changed, turn the TV off to save the new settings.


You are now in the Service mode. Use the Channel up/down to move between
options, and volume up/down to change settings.

I had to adjust a few to straighten out the picture, I beleive they were, DCG,
CNTR(or something), TRAP... and a couple others in the area.

With this done the TV took on a very cleaner look, lines were straight, and I
had no complaints. Movies looked MUCH better than they did on my Magnasonic
TV of the previous day... images took on a cleaner more 3D look, and just an
all around beatuiful picture. BUt still, I couldn't view the beauty of the
anamorphic picture.





or so I thought.



While in the Service mode, I notice a couple options...one called HIT and one
called WID. Height and width. Hmmmm...

So I popped in a DVD and paused it on a very livly scene...a Naboo scene on
Star Wars. And then marked with masking tape and pencil, the edges of the
picture. Then I switched the DVD player to output the 16x9 picture, entered
the service mode. The picture was stretched as one would expect a anamorphic
picture to be on a 4:3 TV, so I went to adjust the HIT and shrunk the picture
down to the marks I made on the tape. But doing this made the picture look
circular, so I had to adjust the DCG again to straighten it out. Once I did,
BLAM! enhanced widescreen TV... the picture looked amazing.
I had never seen the beauty of this mode before, and I was blown away by it's sharpness,
no scan lines were visible even from 2
feet away.
So I wrote down the values I changed for a quick swap to and from
the mode while not watching DVD's. It takes about 1 minute to change these
settings, and since I have them recorded, it's just a matter of changeing the
values.

So even though it is not an option on the TV, V-compression is availiable...



** Be sure to record all initial values before messing with your TV service
menu's, it's your choice to do it, so if you fuss up your TV, it's not my
fault.

Pac-Rat

Thanks for the tip. I'm a novice at this even though I've used service menus before but they were on tvs near death, so i didn't care if I messed up (I never did mess up though ). So, I have a couple questions:
Have you viewed anything besides the dvd after making the HIT & WID changes-like video games or cable/dss? I'm wondering if it distorts the picture and would I have to change it back to the original settings.

Liver&Onions

Well, since cable and most games are not displayed in anamorphic widescreen, yes, you do have to swap it back.

SSX tricky does have an anamorphic picture though.

Mgrmitch

Please provide the group the settings that you changed to get the widescreen enhancement!