Filling a 1280x720 external display properly.

[EricVT]

So far there is really only one thing about the MBP that I am finding a bit disappointing, and that is the video output. I am trying to output to a 1280x720 fixed pixel display via DVI-->HDMI and I have 1280x720 selected as the resolution. For some reason with "Overscan" checked the sides around my screen are cut off somewhat as though the laptop is outputting too large a resolution. If I turn "Overscan" off then I can see the entire screen but there are black borders on all sides and a slight loss of quality (like the picture is being smooshed on all sides).

This display has been professionally calibrated and any other device that outputs a 720p signal fills the screen perfectly with no borders or cutoff.

What can I do to get the MBP to actually output a 1280x720 signal? It's rather annoying.

 

[TEG]

I take it that this is a TV screen. Most TV screen does this to the inputs coming from comptuers, it is because the signal that gets into old NTSC screens was not always straight, so the overscan extended the edge of the input/output so that the mask on the edge of the screen is straight. The actual signal coming to the TV from other video sources is automatically overscanned.

TEG

 

[EricVT]

Is there nothing that can be done? Why is the MBP the only device so far that outputs a 1280x720 signal that doesn't fill my screen (or fills it too much)? It just confuses me.

I know my Toshiba laptop I bought a couple years back had a utility for adjusting the output screen size so you could fill it exactly to your television. Is there anything like this from Apple? It wouldn't be ideal quality wise but at least I wouldn't have 3 inches of black border all around my picture.

 

[TEG]

You should be able to do it on the TV, or set the TV to auto adjust. I have found that it may also have to do with the refresh rate, which I don't think can be changed on DVI/HDMI.

TEG

 

[EricVT]

There aren't any options to adjust it using my television, at least without going into the service menu (and I'm not going to go in there and change settings and mess up my ISF calibration).

I made some headway with DisplayConfigX and was able to fix the missing top and bottom of my screen, but for some reason even if I just adjust the vertical size it causes the screen to shift to the right and I end up with a black bar on the left and too many pixels on the right.

Can't seem to fix that, so it looks like I can't win.