Strange black square on my HD TV

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Author Message   Private Citizen Citizen Username: Privatecitizen Post Number: 71 Registered: 8-2002 Posted on Saturday, November 19, 2005 - 4:03 pm:        Hi All, Don't know how to describe this other than, on occassion, my Panasonic HD TV will suddenly display a black square in the middle of the screen which can only be gotten rid of by turning the tv off, then back on again. On one occassion I even saw strange characters flittering about within this black square...like letters, punctuation, and other symbols. Keep in mind that this black square is sizeable, maybe occupying 20% of the entire screen surface area. Is it the HD TV that's creating this mystery square, or could it be the Comcast cable transmission? I Googled, but couldn't find anything. Thanks.   us2inFL Citizen Username: Us2innj Post Number: 1388 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Saturday, November 19, 2005 - 4:36 pm:        If you have to turn the television off to eliminate it, I would suspect it isn't a Comcast related issue. What it does sound like is some diagnostic or setup menu in the television that is being displayed along with the composite video. Does it go away if you change input sources on the hdtv? When Sony was here setting up our television, the tech was able to access several pages of text that is contained in the sets software. It had overscan and linearity settings as well as a clock timer that kept track of the plasma screen in-use hours.   ril Citizen Username: Ril Post Number: 412 Registered: 6-2001 Posted on Saturday, November 19, 2005 - 7:51 pm:        I don't have an HDTV, but when my TV does that, it's the closed caption/text setting. pressing that button on the remote turns it off (on mine the first setting is captioning, the second is text--that's the box thingie)   us2inFL Citizen Username: Us2innj Post Number: 1390 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Sunday, November 20, 2005 - 6:26 am:        I didn't think of that one, but I think you might be righ, Ril. The only puzzler is why the caption mode wouldn't return after turning the set off and on.