Home Theater Hacks

Hack #92. Adjust the Overscan on Your HDTV Display

Fixing the horizontal and vertical overscan on an HDTV's display isn't trivial; if you're not careful, you can ruin a carefully planned custom resolution.

Overscan problems result from having too much picture. Vertical overscan will have picture bleeding off the top and bottom edges of your display, and horizontal overscan will result in lost picture on the sides. Just the opposite is true for underscan; you don't want a 16:9 picture to appear with black bars, for example. Fixing both categories of problems is easy, once you know exactly what sequence of steps to follow.

Tip

Newer versions of PowerStrip [Hack #91] include a checkbox called Lock Frequency in the Advanced Timings options. This greatly simplifies the ability to adjust overscan in many cases. Enable this checkbox, and then it becomes much safer to adjust the horizontal image size using the horizontal size adjustment buttons in the Advanced Timings options. If you have this option, you can try this method first and skip the section "Adjusting Horizontal Overscan/Underscan" if the results are more than satisfactory.

Adjusting Horizontal Overscan/Underscan

Here's what you need to do to resolve horizontal overscan/underscan problems:

1. First, unplug the computer from the HDTV set, and plug it into your computer monitor.

   Warning

   Resist the temptation to resize the computer image while the computer is connected to the HDTV set. This is important; the procedure of resizing the ...