I just took a look at the back of your TV and I know exactly what your problem is. First, you need to understand that digital cable
is not HD cable necessarily and standard digital cable has
analog outputs. Now, since you're concern is about not being able to keep your Wii connected to your TV without disconnecting your cable box, what you are telling me is that with the numerous numbers of input jacks on the back of your set (and the fact that the Wii comes standard with a red/white/yellow
Analog Composite cable) you are using the only set of
Analog Composite inputs (that also includes the
S-Composite input) on your television set to connect your devices. Now, if you actually have an HD box, then you are not using the correct connections and cables and your beautiful 1080p Resolution High Definition television is
displaying everything on cable at 480i Resolution, Standard Definition,
even the HD channels. Analog connections are incapable of displaying in HD.
Now, I don't know about you, but when I put down my chunk of change and upgraded to HD, I wanted to make darn well sure that I didn't spend all that money to watch it in SD. Of course, that's tongue and cheek because I know you wanted the same thing and I'm going to walk you through the process of solving your problem and getting you the best picture possible out of your TV.
So the first order of business is to make sure that you have an HD box and if you don't you need to contact your cable provider and swap it out. Next you need to get yourself an
HDMI cable for about $3.
DO NOT waste your money on one in a store and do not believe any salesperson that tells you that the expensive ones are better than the cheap ones. They aren't and this is the biggest lie in consumer electronics perpetrated primarily by Monster Cable. Order it from Monoprice, as they are the best and cheapest. 6 feet is the standard.
http://www.monoprice.com/products/search.asp?keyword=hdmi+cable&x=0&y=0
An
HDMI cable is one cable and all you need to do to connect it is put one end in the
HDMI 1 input on the back of your TV and the other end into the cable box. It handles both the audio and video signals and your HD cable box should automatically detect it for video and audio. If by chance it doesn't detect the audio, go into the settings menu of the cable box and choose the audio sub-menu and set it to
HDMI-out (these options might be under the heading
"digital audio").
You'll also want to go into the video settings of your HD cable box and set the
output resolution to only display one resolution (it will probably have several selected by default). Choose
720p or
1080i (your preference) as these are the only HD formats cable television broadcasts in. I have mine set to 1080i and the reason you do this is because not all channels are in the same resolution on digital and HD cable and what will happen is that your TV will have to reset its resolution every time you change channels and the resolutions change. This transition can take up to 30 seconds as you're sitting there staring at a black screen. By setting the resolution on your HD cable box to display only one of the HD resolutions, your HD box will simply upconvert the other resolutions automatically. I say choose between 1080i or 720p because not all cable providers broadcast in 1080i, using 720p exclusively so the 1080i setting is unnecessary.
Last thing about your display regarding HD cable: Your HD cable will display television programs in both the 4:3 (standard) and 16:9 (widescreen) formats. When the program is in 4:3, the image will not fill the entire display showing black bars on the left and right sides of the image. Plasma TV's are susceptible to what is called
screen burn-in (or image retention or as Sanyo calls it, "after-image"). What this means is that if static images stay on the screen for too long, it will actually stay in the screen after you've changed the channel and it can be permanent and this damage is
NOT covered by your manufacturer's warranty. Your TV has a feature to fix this (refer to your manual, near the end) if the "burn-in" is not too extreme, however the best way to avoid screen burn-in is to prevent from happening to begin with. While the TV is displaying a 4:3 program, the point where the image ends and the black bars (lack of image, technically) will burn-in. To avoid screen burn-in, you should change the format of the image to fill the screen via either your cable box (your cable remote will have either a
Zoom key or a
Picture Size key) or on the TV by pressing the
PIX key on the lower left hand corner of your TV remote until you get the desired image. Use the option that zooms in, and not the option that stretches and distort the image.
HDMI Cable
So now you have the
Analog Composite inputs free to use for your Wii, however, I'm going to give you another alternative that will increase the quality of your picture when using your Wii. The Wii has the ability to use
Component Video Cables for its video signal sent to your TV. Your TV has two Component Video Input Jacks
(VIDEO 2 and
VIDEO 3) and the are indicated by their red, blue, and green color. You'll still need to use the analog red and white audio connections when using the
Component Video inputs but for this setup, they are right to the left of them.
Now, of course, Nintendo does make this cable but their's costs $20 and again, you can go right over to Monoprice when you get your HDMI cable and get it for less than $3 and like the Nintendo cable, it comes with the audio cables integrated. I have this cable myself and it makes an amazing difference.
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=108&cp_id=10830&cs_id=1083007&p_id=5689&seq=1&format=2
Your TV will automatically detect both the
HDMI connection and the
Component Video connection so it will not require any setting up.
For more information refer to your manual, here:
http://us.sanyo.com/dynamic/product/Downloads/DP50747_Manual-31187309.pdf
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