I recently bought an Samsung SyncMaster P2470HD 24″ display. So far I was very low-tech with my Ye Olde 19″ display, so going to a big(ish) FullHD display was a great step up. Funnily enough, the package only includes a VGA cable – but seriously, driving a digital display via an analog cable coming from a digital source sounds just stupid.
Nevertheless the picture was sharp and, well, awesome. But I still ordered a new HDMI cable – it’s the new thing, is it not?
It is! Strangely enough, the picture was cut off at the top and the bottom. My good friend Uncle Google found out, that the problem is called “HDMI overscan“, happening when either the display or the PC consider the signal to be designed for a TV. There are lots of solutions to the problem, starting with messing with NVida’s driver settings, just using the VGA cable (or a DVI one, for that matter). The cleanest solution to this is, of course, to tell both the display and the PC to use a clear signal. Most TV/display sets should provide and option to do that, and so does the P2470HD. Just follow these steps:
- Open the sources menu
- Chose HDMI, tools
- Edit name
- Change name to “PC” or “DVI PC”
- Profit!
Yes. Changing the name of the input source actually convinced the SyncMaster to interpret the signal correctly. Lol wut.