Please Help Me (I want to kick my tv in)

[gibson99]

Hi guys,
I recently purchased a 37" Philips LCD tv. I tested out HD with a comcast HD box and everything looked great. I moved a few days ago but I am still using comcast. They gave me a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 800HD DVR. I have it hooked up the same way I had the first box hooked up BUT, now there are gray bars on the HD channels and SD TV is zoomed in to fill the screen. After toying with the TV settings for about an hour, I am not able to get it how it was with the first box. There is no screen format on the TV that makes HD full screen without zooming, even though it was correctly displayed on the first box. Do you guys think that it is the box or the TV? I can;t figure out how it could be the box. Please help I am going CRAZY!!!!!!! Thanks in advance and sorry if this post has rambled on, it's just so frustrating that I had my TV working great a few days ago and now everything is messed up. Thanks again.

[JaserLet]

This has nothing to do with HDTV TiVos. This is an issue you will have to take up with Comcast.

As a hunch, Is there an aspect ratio setting somewhere in the menus on your S-A DVR? Sounds like it needs to be switched to 16:9 mode. You can adjust your TV all you want, but if the DVR is outputting 4:3 material you're going to end up with the annoyingly inverse bars.

[JimSpence]

There is no way to fill the 16:9 screen with 4:3 content without some sort of stretching or zooming. Until all broadcasts are in 16:9, you'll have to put up with the pillar boxes or stretch the display when 4:3 content is shown.

Your old cable box was doing the zooming and you just got used to it.