Hello to all. I recently got my first taste of digitized video, via a WinTV250 capture card. It is not only a highly useful tool for my work, but a great toy. It has created a need for a DVD burner. I noticed that captured video shows the full screen, while my TV displays what I believe is called the "safe zone". It is amazing how much image area is lost!. I estimate no less that 15%, maybe up to 1/5th. With current TVs being much more precise and less prone to lose alignement and the such, shouldn't the safe zone standard be reduced (show more) to a lower level? I am thinking of tweaking my main monitor to display more of the image. Only thing is that the channel logos display way farther from the screen edge, which looks even more intrusive.
If you have a good monitor, I don't see any harm in adjusting it. However, if you have a marginal TV with the usual cheap mass-market power supply, you'll find out why there is so much "safe zone" in these sets...brighter light levels on the screen will cause the picture to shrink. The NAD MR20 monitor/TV my folks owned had a very good power supply, and it was set up to display more of the picture than most sets on the market. OTOH, the Panasonic I looked at about five years ago was terrible...you could see the picture physically shrink any time something bright came on the screen, to the point of distraction.
A lot of tv sets suffer from over-scan ("safe zone"). A good set-up disc like Avia will help correct this working through the service menu on the set. It's amazing how much is wasted, I agree....
Even theatrical films are shot with a substantially sized "safe/title" area. This is to compensate for variability in projection. A mere 5% margin on each side adds up to around 19% of the available frame area. Regards,
