Any way to not use overscan/underscan over HDMI?

[therealseebs]

I have an HDMI display. On a machine with nVidia graphics, I can simply use it as a display -- it's HDMI, it's digital, it's 1920x1080, EVERYTHING IS OKAY.

On my MacBook Air, though, there is an underscan slider. This slider ranges from "off" (everything is scaled up to nocitably larger than the physical display size, and gets cut off) to "more" (everything is scaled into the middle of the display, with black borders). There is no setting for "it is a digital display, how about you try displaying 1920x1080 on it and not making this harder than it needs to be?"

MacBook Air is from January of this year, HD Graphics 3000. FWIW, with Windows machines I have the same problem on all AMD/ATI cards, but nVidia cards have the option of disabling the behavior, whereupon everything looks fine, and a pixel is a pixel.

 

[gr8tfly]

On my Panasonic 50", there is a setting for what is essentially a slight overscan (I forget what the setting is actually called). It's there to compensate for HD broadcasts that are not perfect edge-edge on 1080 - there might be a few pixels worth of noise. I discovered this when using a screen calibrator on one of my Blu-ray discs. When disabled, I would get precisely 1080 HD (1920x1080).

Getting back to the original point: with this disabled and underscan (on the MBP) off, I get exactly 1929x1080 from my MBP (though, it's Nvidia too). (Come to think of it, I'm not 100% sure I have an underscan setting - I could be thinking of an earlier MBP/TV combo. Sorry - just not able at the moment to connect it and test it for you.)

I just thought your display might have a similar setting and could help you out.

 

[therealseebs]

Thanks. It is totally possible that the TV in question (low-end) lacked such a feature -- but in the past, I've found that I seemed to be able to get 1:1 using nVidia's drivers.

In any event, the shortest path to happiness is to return the TV and get a real monitor when more stores are open.

 

[the-doctor]

While I understand the point of overscan on a broadcast signal, I would find it strange that it would do that on a HDMI feed, which should have no noise. What is the model of the TV you are trying to use?