I recently purchased a Panasonic plasma tv, the TH-50PX80U.  It’s a great looking screen, and I’m quite happy with it so far (see the reviews at Amazon).

One of the first things I did was connect my Mac mini so we can watch iTunes and other videos, DVDs using Front Row, Hulu, and so forth.  However, right away we noticed the overscan of the Mac’s video on the plasma.  Most of the menu bar was cut off, and at least half of the dock.  For most video sources this was OK, but the missing menu and dock made things difficult.

I took to searching the net and had a tough time finding settings specific to my display.  I discovered SwitchResX, a program that lets you make custom resolutions for your Mac in order to fix this type of issue. There is a good tutorial over at AV Science forum. It was still a confusing process though, and I was really hoping to find someone else with this same Panasonic so I could try their settings.

I finally discovered a user with a similar plasma using a custom 1224 x 688 resolution with DisplayConfigX (similar to SwitchResX). Based on his settings, I came up with the following:

The main difference between my settings and his are the vertical front and back porch settings. The 1224 x 688 resolution was correct, but I was still getting a bit of the menu bar cut off on the top. I played with these settings a bit and got it to where I have full view of my menu bar (just the tip of the Apple leaf is cut off) and full view of the dock.

I do have a bit of horizontal shift problem, where the image shifts back and forth a pixel or two, once in a while, but it is something I’m still working on. It was mentioned in the thread at AV Science forums, so once I get that sorted I’ll post an update here.

My current settings:

• Horizontal (H) active – 1224
• H front porch – 136
• H Sync – 80
• H Back porch – 208
• Vertical (V) active – 688
• V front porch – 22
• V sync – 5
• V back porch – 36