Hello All. I was wondering if anyone has had this issue or has a resolution for this problem of mine. I have a 42" Pioneer plasma Tv with my cpu connected via VGA. I was told if I use a HDMI to DVI cable I would get a better picture quality coming from the cpu. I bought a Monster brand HDMI to DVI cable. Hooked it up but everything was very big. When I tried to change the resolution in the display properties, I wasn`t able to. Also how about the audio when using that kinda of cable?

Does anyone have any answers?

This is more an issue with what resolutions the plasma accepts via HDMI/DVI. I'd check in the plasma forum for your particular plasma and maybe the HTPC forum for your video card.

larry

Some TV's design their HDMI inputs to be purely "CE" inputs, and thus they do not report support for the common PC resolutions (such as 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, etc). Instead, they only report CE resolutions and timings on the HDMI inputs. If your PC does not have drivers that support CE timings, it will bump down to the lowest common denominator, which is 480p or VGA mode (640x480).

TVs with VGA inputs realize that VGA is a PC input, so they tend to report support for PC timings on the VGA input, and thus you may get a better looking image on VGA.

In short, the EDID on a TV's HDMI input may be completely different from the EDID of its VGA input. One other thing you can do (although not recommended) is to force your PC to output 1280x720 by going into the Display control panel, click Settings, click Advanced, click Monitor, then unclick the box that says "Hide modes that this monitor cannot display". This allows you to manually force the PC graphics system to output a specific video timings, not matter what the TV's EDID is telling you. I would not do this, however, unless you are sure your TV can accept the video timing that you are going to force into it.