Mac Mini Overscan Settings

June 8, 2008 3:02 pm mike Macintosh

The default overscan settings in Mac OS X did not work correctly for my Sony Wega HD TV (KD-34XBR970). Too much of the display was missing in overscan mode. When not using overscan, you could see the uneven edge of the display on each side, which was almost as annoying.

My friend Jason sent along this link that described how another guy got his Sony HDTV display to overscan properly with DisplayConfigX. I used DisplayConfigX back in the 10.3 and 10.4 days when I couldn’t get my Powerbook to display properly on some LCD projectors. I don’t seem to have that issue with Leopard (10.5) on my Macbook.

After literally hours of tweaking, I now have 8 pixels of overscan on each side. Here are my settings:

mac mini displayconfigx

One tip that I found while troubleshooting: After reboot, the new DisplayConfigX configuration wouldn’t always take. Switching to a different resolution and then back to the DisplayConfigX setting seemed to work.

  • Jay
    Thank you so much. Your post saved me after hours of frustration.
  • Every TV needs different overscan settings. At least Apple made an effort to provide support for it in the displays control panel. There really needs to be a GUI tool to do this in real-time.
  • Jason
    What does apple have such a hard time with these types of resolutions?
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