Set up a video projector for better portrait mode photos

May 26, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Do you feel that this is a big disadvantage of modern picture projection compared to the old-fashioned slides: portrait format is really handicaped, because you have two big black bars on the left and right hand sides of the image. Video projectors have an aspect ratio of 4:3 (or even 16:9), compared to the quadratic display size of slide projectors. I thought about that and came up with the following solution:

If you could get a video projector with quadratic display size, everything would be fine. It would signal to the Mac a quadratic screen size (e.g. 768 x 768). If you would display pictures on that screen (e.g. with iPhoto), then portrait format would have the same size as landscape format pictures, each having black bars on top/bottom or left/right. But there is no such device.

So, lets cheat a little bit. With SwitchResX you can define a new custom resolution for the connected video projector. I defined 768 x 768 with 60 Hz to be somewhat on the conservative side at first. (You have to reboot to make this new resolution available.)

My video projector (an old NEC) accepted the new resolution without a problem, although the picture was not quite quadratic yet. I had to fiddle around a little bit with display width and zoom (I had to adjust "pace") but finally: voila, the display was quadratic. Now slide shows are much for fun, with a lot of portrait format pictures. Of course, you lose a bit of the native resolution of the video projector, since you do not use all the pixels of the rows, but that's OK by me.

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