Wii and the VP30 - 720P to my TV is underscanned! WTF!??!

Unless I'm mistaken, I believe the Wii (like the GameCube and PS2) doesn't render in the overscan area, to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the system.

Does the VP30 not have an Overscan control you can apply specifically to the Wii's input to counter this?

I believe what lyris means by "doesn't render in the overscan area" is that the Wii renders an active image whose size is a bit smaller than the full image area. There is less compute power required to render a smaller area, so the effective performance is greater.

It may be that your TV does not treat a 480p signal and a 720p signal the same way. It might, for instance, overscan the 480p signal more than the 720p signal, thus removing the inactive border areas around the Wii's image. You can verify this by using the iScan's test patterns. Put up the first test pattern (Frame/Geometry) and see if you can see the entire test pattern, including the 1-pixel white border line around the outside edge of the image. This test pattern uses the entire active image area of iScan's output, so you can see if your TV is overscanning any of the image. If you see less of the test pattern with the iScan's output set to 480p than with 720p, then your TV is overscanning a 480p input signal more than it is a 720p input signal. If this is the case it is the TV causing the problem, and you have a couple of options to fix it (outside of adjusting the TV itself):

1) You can use the iScan's overscan control setting to increase the size of the Wii image so that it fills the screen.

2) You can, in fact, tie an output resolution to an input (or a specific resolution of a given input). You need to use the iScan's display profile feature to do it, though, with unique display profiles set up for 720p and for 480p. Your VP30's user manual should explain how to do this.

- Dale Adams

Yep, what Dale said is what I meant. The Xbox was the first console that I know of to render a full frame instead of only what would be visible on most TVs.