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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

Completely tangential, but why is

> NEW: TV SAFE ZONE DEBUGGING

still a thing that needs to be added to a brand new engine targeting the latest console generation. It's 2016. Why do TVs still do overscan? And why the hell are there still TVs being produced where overscan can't be turned off?

This will never change if we accept the status quo and actually add features to help with this mess.

What should happen is that devices and software should assume overscan to be off and then maybe allow for manual correction.

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I couldn't agree more with the sentiment. It seems absolutely insane to sell a TV with a certain resolution and then make it very hard to actually use all the pixels.

Unfortunately on many devices it can be very difficult if not impossible to activate a pixel perfect display mode. Developers can't expect people to buy a new TV or track down obscure and poorly named settings on their TV so we are stuck with overscan.

> And why the hell are there still TVs being produced where overscan can't be turned off?

Because you wanted the price of a new HDTV to be $200. Consumer electronics are focused mostly on price, rarely on quality. The menus for most of these devices are incomprehensible and the new fad is IoT and Smart TVs, not usability. HDMI has a flag you can set to say "please don't overscan", but I know of absolutely 0 TVs that respect it.

Also, because standards and legacy content means that content is produced for older standards. Backwards compatibility in broadcast TV has always been important. With a simple converter box, you can view signals from the 1950s on a modern TV. So we can't just turn overscan off globally for everyone.

> Because you wanted the price of a new HDTV to be $200.

actually, performing overscan requires more functionality on the TV. That's what I think is so crazy. You have a digital signal producer (the console), a digital link (the HDMI cable) and a digital signal consumer (the TV).

And then you add additional code to the TV to cut off some pixels from the digitally fed signal and then scale the resulting image.

As this is significant additional functionality compared to just showing the image you're being fed, I don't buy the pricing argument at all. If you wanted it to be cheap, just don't overscan.

The cost of doing overscan at all must be much higher than the cost for a toggle to turn if off.

Presumably you already have some scaling mechanism for non-native resolution inputs already.

It adds a fair bit of lag, too, which is already pretty bad on most HDTVs.

They have added a sequencer which works much more like a traditional non linear editor, only you can compose the shots in real time. Even though modern display technology is somewhat better, safe zones are still a useful tool for composing shots and many people in the film industry are used to this visualization even beyond it's original use.

> What should happen is that devices and software should assume overscan to be off and then maybe allow for manual correction.

And then people think your device or your software is broken. Most people, if trying to debug something, are going to assume that the TV is not the part that's messed up.

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