Overscan Sniper HD is an application that checks how much, if any, overscan your TV or monitor has. Does it hit the target or fly right over the head? Read on to find out.
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You may be wondering what overscan is, so here comes the science part. Overscan is the part of the TV screen that is not seen by the viewer. This was commonly found in old CRT TV’s and varied between make. You are basically left with less picture to view as it was not fully displayed on the screen, you can see this in the example below courtesy of Wikipedia.
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Overscan can still be found in the latest TV’s but is much less noticeable thanks to fixed pixel technologies such as LCD and Plasma screens. So why should this be a concern? Take games for example, if your TV has a high overscan, important information can be missing such as a health bar. Luckily, most developers take this into account and place important information away from the sides of the screen, but you still occasionally see games where this has not been implemented. Overscan can be annoying and there is nothing you can do about it except buy a new TV.
Overscan Sniper HD allows you to see how much overscan your TV or monitor may or may not have. Simply set your Xbox 360 resolution to 720p, 1080i or 1080p and run the application. A horizontal and vertical level are displayed and you can see how much of the image you are missing.
The horizontal levels show the percentage, if you can not see the 100% mark your TV is suffering from overscan. The vertical levels show how much in pixels could be missing, the left side shows in 720p and the right shows 1080p. I connect my 360 via component to my PC TV/monitor (1680×1050 native resolution) and in my tests I was missing around 3 pixels in 720p and around 7 in 1080i.
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You can also change the applications TV channels to provide a simple series of tests to display Red, Green, Blue colours, Contrast, Colour Bars, Levels and Brightness which might be handy if you need to set them up on a new TV for example.
So what does the Sniper part of the name mean? I guess if you do find out you have some overscan you can press the Y button to shoot the in game TV to blow off some steam. Fun for a couple of shots but it soon wears thin.
Overscan Sniper HD costs 240 :MSPoints: which is expensive for what it does. A bit of digging around on Google will provide you with images you can display on the 360 photo viewer which should do the same job. Dropping the price to 80 :MSPoints: would be ideal but even then is this an application people would bother to buy?
You can find more information on as well as download the trial or full version on the Marketplace.
Credit to Wikipedia for the overscan example image.
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