ariomanus said:
When setting the resolution to 1920x1080 in the GeForce driver, the card has sent an interlaced picture to the screen. This was shown on the TV with some overscan. Some lines were missing at the top and the bottom. The "Start"-button was only visible after moving the picture up with the "up"-button on the remote control.
When changing the settings manually to 1080p there was no reasonable picture any more. I also couldn't change this with powerstrip. I didn't manage to get a 1:1 pixel mapping with 1080i or 1080p.
I hope someone else has more luck or Philips will offer a software upgrade.
Now I'm thinking about what happens when a 1080i video signal is sent to the screen, for example from a dvd player with 1080i output? Can someone prove whether there are also some lines missing at the top and the bottom, maybe with a test dvd? If this is the case, then the dvd player would scale the picture to 1080 lines, then the tv would remove some lines and scale the rest to 1080 again, which makes no sense to me.
This is what you can expect when looking at the HDTV specs (SMPTE 274M).
There is a border of 16 pixels all around the picture which is the "overscan" area.
Content producers can use lesser standards in this area.
A CRT TV will display the area within this border, and use the border to have some room when picture size varies because of tolerances, warming up, etc.
An LCD TV could decide to display the entire 1920x1080 area but there could be some nasty effects (e.g. blue line, white line) at the extreme edges. Conservatively, it could crop off 16 pixels.
TVs are not meant to be computer displays, and this shows. Not only is there this issue of overscan (with associated scaling and pixel mapping problems), the TV guys also invented their own mapping of digital RGB values to screen brightness. Somewhat similar to overscan (the range from black to full brightness does not use the entire value range from 0 to 255).
Do not expect a TV to support 1080p unless it is clearly marked in the specs. For this mode, the scan rates, pixel rates etc are all doubled. This requires seriously faster stuff. Maybe in next year's model?
Don't count on a software upgrade either. Although this model offers field-updradable software, with the 9986 there are serious issues around PC connectivity as well and people asking Philips sometimes got "that is the way this set is designed" (which is of course true, but solves nothing when the design is suboptimal) and sometimes "we will be considering it". But when the 9830 appeared at the horizon there was a firm "there will be no more development on the 9986".
Consumer electronics firms usually see the product lifecycle only with development pre release and then shortly to fix immediate production problems. There is no continued development and maintenance throughout the expected lifetime of the product. Once customers have bought the product there is no longer a need to improve it, the sale has been made and there is no more money to be made.
Exceptions to this rule are far between, there are only very few consumer electronics companies that continue to release new versions of firmware for existing products. New versions with new functionality (as opposed to outright buxfixes) are even rarer.