I’m having trouble putting this problem into words that yield anything useful from Google, so I’m going to show y’all and see if anyone can point me in the right direction.
It’s a Samsung LCD flatscreen, and it’s about 5-6 years old. This problem comes and goes, and has gone away a couple times when we unplugged and replugged it, and when we changed the aspect ratio. But neither fixes it now. It seems to happen when you first turn it on, so maybe as it warms up it gets better?
Anyhow, here are some pictures. It looks like the TV’s trying to display two aspect ratios at once or something. 
With nothing but the TV turned on.
Withthe computer turned on.
It does the same thing with the DVD player on, too.
Help me, Dopi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!
I don’t have a solution, but I want to commend you for posting pictures!
It looks like it is displaying two copies of the picture, offset a couple of inches vertically from each other.
You might try unplugging all the input cables from the back and plugging them back in one at a time. It could be some input is confusing the timing.
Maybe a poor connection between the video source and the display panel? It would be an internal cable, so you’d have to open it up to unplug and re-plug any cables.
I have a hunch that it’s not just a cable problem. No, I’ve never seen this before, but I would bet that a passive component like a leaking capacitor is involved, especially since a warm-up period seems to resolve the issue.
I appreciate the help folks! It definitely does it when nothing is connected, and the TV is just showing its own “No signal” image. So sadly it’s not the cables.
My husband called it “ghosting,” and that led me to some fruitful searches on Google. Someone posted an image that’s just like ours on an answer site. Unfortunately the answer was “it’s probably the LCD panel - time for a new TV.”
Oh well, at least we know pretty definitively it’s time to find a few hundred bucks in the budget.
I am sorry. Thanks for taking the time to post a followup.
There seem to be a lot of deals on TV sets right now.
Keep an eye on the deals sites like fatwallet.com and slickdeals.net.
I’d call it ghosting, too. It was more common in the days of analog signals and CRT displays and dinosaurs. I’m having a hard time coming up with a (realistic) mechanism that would do that on an LCD. Which just means it’s an intriguing problem to me, not that I don’t think it’s real.
Of course, most of my knowledge on how LCD screens work is from cell phones. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t make sense to me.
Thanks for the links! I see a couple good prospects already. Also, my husband’s new employer has special discounts with Sony, so we’ll be looking at that.
And also just letting it warm up till it displays properly for a while, most likely. All our fun money is earmarked for vacations over the next two months. First world problems!
