t400 radeon 3450 TVout to samsung c610 at 1080p?

Hi all,

I'm trying to build an HTPC to go with my Samsung 46" C610 series TV. But before that, I'm testing out the PC-input capability of the TV, so I've attached my T400 w/ Radeon 3450 discrete graphics to the TV, but I'm having trouble getting the right resolution to display.

My TV supports 1080p, so I was expecting that the Radeon card would be able to project 1920x1080 on my TV, but when I try, the screen looks all garbled. Instead, when I only display on the TV (not on my laptop), it'll go as high as 1600x1200. This is what the TV reports, although i'm suspicious because everything looks widened, as if it's a 4:3 resolution being stretched to 16:10.

When I change the display settings to display on both TV and laptop, the highest resolution is 1650x1050, and I get the black bars on the top and bottom of my TV screen.

Please note that I'm actually only using a VGA cable for TV-out. Has anyone tried TVout with their Thinkpad/Radeon, and is this resolution issue a limitation of using the laptop as the source? If i was using a desktop video card, or DVI/HDMI, would it work properly? Does anyone else with my laptop have issues displaying 1080 on their HDTV?

I want to make sure the HTPC is going to work with my TV at the highest resolution, so I want to know if this resolution issue is unique to my T400.

Thanks!

 

some TV has a restriction on the vga input resolution, have a look at the tv instruction booklet to see what is the maximum resolution input for vga port.

Some brand of tv are picky about dvi inputs, if you want to try dvi, get a second hand advanced mini dock.

 

^ The Advanced mini-dock would be the best away to go about this. That way you could connect extra peripherals that you might use with your HTPC and then be able to take the T400 with you on the go when you need to use it as your notebook.