Pillarboxing
 

I just my first hdtv a couple of weeks ago, a Panasonic Viera TH-42PX80U. Letterboxing has never really bothered me much but, I gotta say that pillarboxing has. It's not so much that the bars are there but that they are light gray. I was able to turn them black on my directv receiver so I was hoping there would be a way to do so for the tv itself, also. I finally found out the way but, I'm not sure if it safe or not. I went to the anti image retention on the menu under picture and turn the side bar from bright to off. Will this harm my tv?

Well, since you've only had the television for a few weeks, you have a higher chance of the black parts of your screen not being stimulated as much as your active screen which could be problematic. So, you might see a nice semi-bright square area on your screen when you turn the TV off. This is natural to some degree, but for such a new TV, you don't really want to do this at the moment. You want to burn in all the pixels on your television evenly for about 100-150 hours.

Of course, you can negate this if you watch a proportional amount of 1.78:1 ("16x9") material but if you don't, then I'd recommend avoiding this method until you've watched around 100-150 hours worth of entire-screen material. Even stretch the 4:3 content if you have to.