Projector Problem

I have here a Sony Vaio that has a resolution of 1200 x 800 pixels. I have an older XGA projector, also Sony, that absolutely refuses to display the projected image as a letterbox format. I have changed the resolution of "Monitor 2" to no avail, it just will not stick and it resolutely ends up as a 1024x768 image. The horizontal info is all there, but compressed as the vertical height is too great. OS is Vista.

Any ideas?

John not that this helps, but a colleague suffered a similar problem when using a wide screen Thinkpad (I can't remember the resolution) and a Panasonic XGA projector. He too was running Vista OS. He worked out settings that gave a half reasonable display, but as you say they did not 'stick' and had to be reset on every use.

Lenovo tech support failed to help and he exchanged the laptop for a standard screen version.

Steve

Change OS? Not that it has to do with Vista.
90 % of all problems go back to compatibility issues from the used hardware. Could it be that your XGA Sony projector works fine under XP ? Maybe there is a driver update on their site, that could solve your problem.

Martin.

Simple answer is because the projector doesn't support the resolution you want, it is not a letterbox format, does not have a letterbox format resolution. Windows will be using a generic XGA display driver, so I'm guessing your options are:-

640 x 480
800 x 600
1024 x 768

So, does the projected image need to be widescreen? Presuming you are using it for photos, then the projector is in the right format (4:3), the laptop isn't (16:9).

Having it set up as a 2nd display is good and the right thing to do as you have 2 seperate native resolutions, but the best way of achieving what you want is to buy a widescreen projector!

I have a widescreen laptop and use it for teaching. None of the data projectors I have used (quite a few!) support the widescreen format and are generally of lower resolution than my laptop screen. Powerpoint also assumes the projected image is the normal screen ratio.

Best wishes, Kris.

This is how I have my laptop set up (for true dual head with separate resolution):

[IMG]http://i233.photobucket.com/albums/ee91/terje-l/resolution.jpg[/IMG]

A projector is just another LCD monitor, and should be used at its native resolution for maximum sharpness.

I would second Martins comments, probably a driver or software issue somewhere along the way, I quite like VIsta but still get irritated when I discover something wont work 100% because the drivers were written for XP or even earlier versions of windows.

It's not a driver issue from what I can see, just a hardware restriction. XGA monitors / projectors just do not support any widescreen resolutions, which is why none of them show up in display properties.