Pioneer 3510 no longer letterboxes things on my 4/3 TV

[trenchard]

First off, thanks to everyone on here for educating me on the new Pioneer boxes. I picked one up a month or so ago and everything worked fine until the past few days.

I have a Toshiba TNNx55 and had the Pioneer box set up to output at 1080i and Letterbox the picture on my 4x3 TV. It worked great until a couple of days ago (Sept. 3 or 4 I think).

Now that no longer works. The 1080i picture is stretched to fill the entire screen when I choose the letterbox option.

The only way I can get it to work the old way is to choose 480p output -- which letterboxes nicely the way the 1080i used to.

Does this have something to do with the upgrade to the Pioneer boxes mentioned elsewhere?

Thanks greatly for any help!

[The Law]

hmm...what channels is this on - HD channels?  I have mine set to ouput 480p, 480i and 1080i (this is what my tv supports).  If I set to 720p, it hoses the picture.  I have a mitsubishi that is supposed to upconvert the 720p to 1080i (I have warranty - tech will be out soon to check this out).

I have not had the problem you describe, however, if one of the HD channels (504,505,506, etc) is showing a non HD show, it will only output in 4:3 unless I monkey with the TVs aspect ratio settings (not the cable boxes).

though this doesn't address your issue..hope it helps nonetheless.

[trenchard]

Thanks for the response! I forgot to mention that this is on HD channels only.

My picture gets hosed too when I use 720. I'll go back and try using it with 480i, 480p and 1080i.

When everything was working perfectly and I was watching a non-HD program on a HD channel, the program would be displayed in the middle with black borders on all sides.

[The Law]

Could be a setting on the tv, although, it's weird that you'd get black bars across the top and bottom on a 4:3.

Could it be the reason it is appears to fill the whole screen is that the pioneer is set to "zoom"?

[trenchard]

Unfortunately, there aren't any applicable settings on the normal TV menu.

Even though I have the Pioneer set to letterbox, it seems to default to zoom when I choose 1080i as the output. 420p still looks great, but I'd love to get that 1080i letterboxed look back.