I've just bought a nice Panasonic g10 42" Full HD plasma. It comes with a Freeview HD tuner built in, but I only have a Sky dish, so that will have to wait until I get a UHF aerial up on the roof. Meanwhile, I simply unplugged the old Samsung CRT and hooked up the new plasma to my existing Cheap Guy Sky (the free to air channels only, with far better reception than I would get otherwise).

Great images, everything peachy, runs like a bought one.

Okay, here's my problem...

The images coming through my sky decoder are all 4:3 ratio. That's okay - I figured I would just switch to the 4:3 aspect option on the plasma, and make do until I've got an HD signal coming in. But wait - the Sky free-to-airs have at least 10% of the original picture cropped off each side! The clue - graphics in the corners and subtitles missing first or last letters. The proof - when I switch to the crappy, ghosting, static filled land signal, I can just make out the outside areas I've been missing. What's really annoying is that I assumed my old CRT was failing, in that its picture was blooming out. Now I suspect it was Sky robbing me of pic the whole time!

Choosing 16:9 and swithing in the overscan function claims back a teensy bit more of the pic, but not enough to compensate for the subsequently annoying stretched out short fat people look.

Here's my big question - are things going to get better when I fire up FreeviewHD? Are the channels in 16:9? Are they at least 4:3 with ALL of the picture being broadcast?

Please note: no suggestions regarding Tivo, MySky, MyFreeviewHD or any other money-needing solutions (the UHF aerial will be taking my final dollars!)

Cheers.

[Moderator edit (MF): moved to correct forum]