Hi guys,

I just recently purchased a Kuro 5020fd and got my direct tv hd receiver hooked up.

I tried doing a search and couldn't find a simple answer but is there a way to program the kuro to change picture formats from HD to SD? Right now, if I'm watching an HD program, when I switch to an SD program, it's not full screen but there are gray lines that appear on the sides. I have to manually fix this by toggling thru the picture formats on the remote.

Hi guys,

I just recently purchased a Kuro 5020fd and got my direct tv hd receiver hooked up.

I tried doing a search and couldn't find a simple answer but is there a way to program the kuro to change picture formats from HD to SD? Right now, if I'm watching an HD program, when I switch to an SD program, it's not full screen but there are gray lines that appear on the sides. I have to manually fix this by toggling thru the picture formats on the remote.

Could you be more specific as to what you wish the Kuro to do exactly?

Sorry for being so vague....what I was trying to explain is to eliminate the gray bars on the side of SD programs automatically. HD shows are being displayed in full screen but when I switch channels to an SD broadcast, the display has gray bars on the side.

Is it possible for the TV or the DirectTV receiver to detect an SD channel and just make that have a full screen display as well?

Why would you want to do that? HD broadcasts are 16:9, and hence fill the screen. SD is 4:3, so you either have bars on the sides, or stretch the picture (which looks worse than the bars).

I just thought it wasn't good for the tv to have the bars on the side for a long period of time.

I just thought it wasn't good for the tv to have the bars on the side for a long period of time.

Today's plasmas, especially the Kuro, do not have much burn-in potential anymore. Unless you watch SD with the bars all day long, I wouldn't worry about it.

set the tv to do it automatically... go into the tv menu and set the auto size to
wide-zoom. It will take a second or two but on 4x3 material it will scale it to 16x9 automatically. It is anti-wife burn in option so that you age the sides of the tv evenly in the beginning of its life. Also since it zooms in the image, when you hit the guide button on the directv remote you will notice that the sides of the guide menu are zoomed in, give the tv a second and it will zoom back out to normal so that you can read all of the guide menu.