Direct TV signal & large screens (1 Viewer)

[Eddie Ras]

i have a question --

will the problems with a direct tv/tivo receiver (combo receiver) affect all large screens pretty equally across the board? i tested out the samsung HLM507W DLP yesterday and it's a great tv- but it doesn't handle direct tv/tivo feed well.

am i correct to assume that this reduced picture quality via direct tv/tivo is not specific to the DLP technology but more because of the direct tv compression- or should i begin demo-ing other tv's, regular rear projection, LCD,??

 

[Bill Slack]

Yes, blowing it up that big makes it look pretty bad. Properly calibrating that input and going through a good line doubler and scaler will make it look the best that it can, but... garbage in, garbage out, I'm afraid.

Some channels look decent in 4x3 pillar box mode on my 40" set from ~6.5ft away. The regional sports channels look the worst (of channels I watch, anyway... but they look worse than most of the other channels on cable too.)

HDTV looks really nice, and the local upconvert feeds look better since they get more bandwidth and (some of them, at least) go through the best scalers money can buy...

Having the contrast or brightness in correct for the DTV/Tivo can really bring out the problems in the signal, so make sure it's somewhat calibrated. And if you're using a zoom/stretch mode, try using a pillar-box (i.e., black/gray bars on the sides.)