EYESPORTS

RE: Help with non-HD reception

I took delivery and setup a 61" DLP (Samsung) today.

I have an HD cable box and am running HDMI to the new set. I set the cable box to work with formats 1080i, 720p, 480p and 480 wide (as instructed by Cablevision)

The problem I have is when I watch stations that are non-HD (ie, sports channels), they are blurred and grainy. The HD stations are crystal clear, however, the non-HD are not a good picture. I called Samsung - who was no help (they blame it on CableVision - as they say if I have a clear picture on HD, that means the set is fine).

Any help?

Lew Crippen

Re: Help with non-HD reception

The set is fine—what you are seeing is SD blown up to 61” size. I assume that your previous display was much smaller than your new set. The less detailed resolution of NTSC is not so apparent on smaller displays, but when that same resolution is blown up to a larger size, the lack of resolution becomes very apparent.

For example, you can look at a youtube picture at a small size on your computer screen and (maybe) it looks OK—but expand that to full screen size and it looks pretty bad.

Bottom line—don’t blame the manufacturer for the limits of NTSC telecasts.

¡Time is not my master!

EYESPORTS

Re: Help with non-HD reception

If that's the case, would there be any way of "shrinking" down the size of the picture to make it clearer? Can one add bars 360 degrees (at top, bottom and sides). As it is, the picture is horrible.

Joseph DeMartino

Re: Help with non-HD reception

First and most important question - when you say you "set up" the TV, did you take it out of the box and plug it in, or did you run a calibration disc like Video Essentials or Avia Guide to home theater? Because if you haven't, then even your HD picture doesn't look nearly as good as it should. (And the guys at Samsung are idiots because they should know that their TVs, like all TVs, are deliberately maladjusted right out of the box so they stand out on the showroom floor. They should be adjusted so that they accurately reproduce the incoming signals, but they never are.)

If you have properly calibrated the set and the SD channels still look that bad - well, your channels may just look especially bad or Comcast may be over-compressing your signal or the wiring either to your house or in your house may not be up to HD snuff. My aunt had long cable runs and a couple of partly corroded wires that never seemed to affect her SD service and which were only discovered when a tech came out to find out why she was having so much trouble after switching to HD. A signal amplifier and some new wire fixed the problem.

Having said that, let me add this: Your SD channels are never going to look very good, and it isn't just a matter of size. Your DLP set up-scales all inputs to its native resolution. It can accept inputs from 480i up to 1080p, but it can only display either 720p or 1080p. (Depending on the model.) And the set in inhernetly much sharper than your previous SD set. The combination simply makes all the flaws that were always present in the low-res signal more apparent than they would be on an SD set that doesn't have the resolution to show the flaws. (That's why local news operations all had to build expensive new sets when they went to HD - whereas they could simulate a brick wall with brick-pattern wallpaper in the SD days, and count on the low-res signal to hide the coffee stains embedded in the news desk, the new HD cameras showed how cheap and phony those sets looked.)

Blowing these same signals up to an even larger size certain makes the problem worse, but it isn't like the SD channels would look great if your TV had a mode that could somehow duplicate the screen area of your old TV. (Which it doesn't.)

But I'm guess you haven't calibrated your set - in which case you aren't even in a position to evaluate it yet. 90% of the people who buy HDTVs go through very much this experience: "Holy crap! My TV looks worse than my old set, and even my HD channels don't look as good as they did in the store. Am I going to have to return the damned thing?" That was my reaction when I took delivery on my 56" JVC. 20 minutes with Avia Guide to Home Theater and the HD channels looked amazing, my SD DVDs looked great and my SD cable channels were watchable - some were bettet than others, depending on how good the original source material was. (Ditto for DVDs. I have some, like the later seasons of CSI, that are so well-mastered they look almost as good as the HD broadcasts when upscaled on my TV. Others, from old TV shows shot on videotape, look marginal.)

Buy or rent a good calibration disc - or at the very least see if you have a movie with the THX Optimizer program on it - and try to take the TV off the factory-default "torch mode" settings where brightness and contrast are set way too high and the "sharpness" or "detail" control (which adds video noise to artificially emphasize the edges of objects and does nothing to actually make the image sharper) is maxed out. At a miminum try setting brightness and contrast to the mid-point, turn off all automatic video processing ("Cinema", "Natural Fleshtones", etc.) and turn sharpness down to no more than 10% on the scale. This rough-and-ready adjustments alone should improve the quality of your picture - HD and SD - by at least 80 percent.

Regards,

Joe

My Home Theater

My DVD Collection

EYESPORTS

Re: Help with non-HD reception

Thanks Joe. Your reply added much insight. The wiring in our home is all brand new (new construction), so I shouldn't have to worry about that. I tried to calibrate the colors - based upon my eye (what I liked), but it is so difficult. I'll look into the Avia Guide to Home Theater or Video Essentials. I suspect that will help a bit with colors, brightness, etc, but I can't see that playing a big roll with the poor quality picture that I'm getting. the photo was taken ou

Joseph DeMartino

Re: Help with non-HD reception

That's because you haven't tried calibration yet. Like I said, you're experiencing what 90% of new HD owners experience. (The other 10% are experienced HT types who automatically calibrate all new TVs before they even try to watch them.) And in 90% of cases calibration makes a dramatic difference to the over-all picture quality, not just brightness and color. (And it is flat-out impossible to adjust a set to industry spec "by eye". If you're not using test patterns, you aren't seeing what the broadcaster is trying to send.)

Just killing all the pre-set image processing and above all losing the "sharpness" will get rid of the graininess and blocky appearance in SD channels, which are mostly the result of distortions and noise introduced into the signal by the factory settings. (One classic symptom of bad pre-sets is that areas that should be smooth transitions between similar shades of color - the ocean blues in underwater shots or the reds and oranges in a sunset - will appear as distinct bands or rings with very sharp boundaries. Sound familiar?)

But, again, there are limits. One way to see this is to watch ESPN HD on a properly calibrated set and then see the highlight reels switch between sources that originated as SD and those that originated in HD. The SD stuff looks like crap because the signal basically is crap and you're now seeing it on a set that can display all of its flaws. An NTSC display conceals a multitude of sins. That's the downside of going to HD.

On the other hand, you'll probably find yourself gradually watching less and less SD programming anyway. I hardly ever do these days. At this point there is more HD programming availabe on my cable system than I have time to watch in a given week anyway, so I don't miss whatever is on the SD channels that don't have HD versions.

Regards,

Joe

My Home Theater

My DVD Collection