Hitachi 36CX39B TV has a black square in the center

sbendre · Guest

Friends,
My 5 year old Hitachi TV has suddenly started showing a black square in the center of the screen. When I click on [Menu], this sqare goes away and I can see the picture while my Menu is displayed. When I exit from menu, the black square reappears.
I can see the picture around the black square and audio is perfectly fine. This happens while using Cable TV or DVD.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Guest · Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2005 3:25 am Post subject:

Sounds like the typical "close caption" window that is somehow activated
Not familiar with the particular set, but look for turning off &/or deactivating
"close caption".

Guest · Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 8:34 am Post subject:

I have what sounds like a very similar or the same problem with a 6 yo Toshiba CN36H90. I played around with every button on the remote and nothing happens. In my case it is not the closed caption as the rectangle is much larger. In fact if you press a menu button the rectangle which the menu is in is the exact size of the rectangle which gets completely black seconds later. It does not appear when the set it first turned on or when changing channels, but shows up moments later. Interestingly, it also does not appear on some commericals (i think those which are locally fed by the cable company as that it seems to be local ads). This just started happening to me and is very puzzling.

Guest · Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 8:55 am Post subject:

Interestingly enough, after writing my response above I decided that I would put up a new post with some pictures of my problem. The first picture had the black rectangle, the second was to show the outline of the box on a menu screen shot. Turns out the menu screen which happened to come up was the closed captioned menu and it was set to T4!. Well when I cleared that and turned it off it seemed to do the trick. In thinking about it, when as I wrote it did not appear during certain commericals...that had to be because they weren't broadcast with cc. Anyway, thank you to sbendre for posting the question and to the guest with the answer. The internet can truly be a wonderful thing!!!

thankfull · Guest

Thanks for the advice about t4 on the cc menu. I had the exact same problem. And spend all Sunday trying to figure out the problem. I came across your post and it was fix in under a minute.

Rhode_Island_Red · Guest

I've seen this problem with Sony TV's on the Charter cable system. Changing the closed-caption settings also fixed the problem. As mentioned before, it appears to be a false trigger from a signal generated by the cable provider.

Marco