This article addresses black bars that appear on the sides or top and bottom of the video display and how to correct for this.

If you are seeing black bars on the sides or top and bottom of your display, or the video is not filling the entire screen (letterboxing), chances are there are adjustments that need to be made in your video graphics card settings. Many times this issue will happen after there has been an update to your video graphics card driver.

About Video Display Resolutions
A display’s native resolution is its width and height measured in number of pixels. Generally, for best performance, an image displayed on this monitor will look best when your computer’s output resolution matches the monitor’s native resolution.

For computer output resolutions at non-native resolutions, the monitor will typically scale the video to its panel’s native resolution. This involves stretching or compressing the input image as needed in the X- and Y-dimensions to fit the display’s native resolution. Some video graphics cards will not allow the stretching of the video and instead will scale down the video causing black bars on the sides and or top and bottom of the display area. 
An unavoidable byproduct scaling algorithms is a loss of fidelity when the computer’s output video image is scaled by the monitor to fit the display. This loss of fidelity is most apparent when viewing feature-rich images at close distances (for example images containing small-font text).

Example of video not filling entire screen.



Resolution Settings
In the example photo above, the monitor's native resolution is supposed to be 1920 x 1080, however, someone set the resolution to 800 x 600 which caused the video to not fill the entire display area. To fix this the resolution had to be adjusted to a higher resolution in order to fill the display area.

Every Elo product has compatible video resolutions listed on each product's specification page. If your Elo monitor is not running at a supported resolution or at a smaller than "native" resolution, then the video may not fill the entire display area. You will need to change your resolution to a supported higher resolution to correct for this issue.

Scaling Options
Some video card manufacturers (such as AMD's Radeon) have a "Scaling Options" setting in their graphics utility. Often this setting has been set to overscan the video. In this case you would need to change the scaling settings to zero "0" to correct for the overscaling. Often times these settings are buried deep within the graphics card settings. Please refer to the attached .pdf for an example of this and steps for correcting it.

Center or Scale
Some video card manufacturers (such as Intel Graphics cards) have a setting in their utility to “Center” the image or “Scale” the image. You will need to look in your graphics properties for these settings and adjust them accordingly.