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The until-recently-unknown-to-me Masters of Cinema has an article up on the phenomenon of video overscan and how to avoid it. Overscan has always bothered me I always thought one of the best things about letterboxed movies was that at least you get to see all the way to the top and bottom of the screen, if not to both horizontal edges but I never thought of dedicating a Web page to it.
I bought me a Malata DVD-N996 player several years ago and remain pretty happy with it. It doesn't yield the best image overall, but it does a nice job of playing PAL discs on an NTSC television and allows wanton up-and-down scaling of the picture.
But what's even better is the Sony Wega series TV I bought last year, which allows overscan to be adjusted on the service menu of the display itself, thus taking care of the problem on DVDs as well as laserdisc, VHS and even cable TV signals. I get a geeky kick out of seeing all the way out to the very edges of broadcast graphics, for instance, where the designers occasionally get sloppy and leave their work kinda ragged. Also entertaining is the extra flesh you get to see when titillating scenes are prude-framed by the bottom of your TV in many cases, a set adjusted for minimal overscan will show the towel or shorts worn by ostensibly naked people showering, having sex, holding picture frames in front of their private bits, etc.
Some of the junk at the edges of the frame of a TV broadcast can be pretty distracting, so I guess this solution isn't for everyone. Fortunately, it's not that hard to go into the service menu and push the image back out a centimeter or two if something really starts bugging you. But the extra eye appeal of a perfectly framed movie image even if the difference is just a sliver on either side (and as the Web page linked above amply demonstrates) is surprisingly gratifying.
(Some DPs, by the way, make this a difficult proposition even with all the tricks available to get that whole picture from your DVD onto the screen. Vittorio Storaro, for instance, insists on transferring Apocalypse Now at about a 2.0:1 ratio rather than the 2.40:1 (35mm) or even 2.2:1 (70mm) at which it was originally exhibited. That's his prerogative, of course, but I don't have to like it.)
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