Can I watch tv? Or must I stick to DVD? (1 Viewer)

[LaMarcus]

I can not bare to watch NTSC signals on my tv, it's terrible! My 65" looks horrible watching so called digital cable. But when I got upstairs to my bedroom and watch the 36" on the same channel the picture is 100xbetter!!

Is satelite any better? or must I stick to DVD for a good picture on my 65"? (hdtv excluded ofcoarse)

 

[RichN]

It may not be the TV, especially if DVDs look good. How are you splitting the signal to get to both TVs? Sounds like you may have a loose connection somewhere between the cable input to the house and the downstairs TV. Give us more info. as to where your cable comes in (closer to upstairs or downstairs). Is the picture bad on ALL channels or just certain ones. Are you using an amplifier/splitter or just a regular 1 to 2 split? I would check the cable connection going to the "bad" TV and work backwards from there.
RichN

 

[LaMarcus]

Dammit RichN!! That's a lot of freakin work man. I was afrain one of you was gonna tell me to do that. The previous owners of this house have the cable wire running God know's where, with God know's how many non-gold tipped slpitters.
I was hoping you were gonna say something like cable sucks on bigscreens for everybody, so I'd have a excuse to get a satelite.
But to answer the question, some channels are ok (barely) and some are horrific. But up stair all channels are crystal. The tv in the basement(bigsreen) I know for a fact is on a spliter (maybe 2), the one up stairs not sure.

 

[Allan Jayne]

Try using a composite cable (yellow jacks) instead of S-video. Many digital cable channels are really analog signals and on average the comb filter in the cable box needed to make it come out as S-video is not as good as that in your TV.
Also for a few minutes try running the antenna or cable TV feed directly to the big TV without any splitters, to see if things are better. Your big TV may not be as sensitive for far away stations or weak signal strength and the splitter always weakens it.
Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm

 

[LaMarcus]

I talked with the cable guy today as he delivered my hd cable box and as it stands, your only allowed one line off of the pole. So no matter where you have cable going in your house, if it's in more than one room, then it's on a splitter.

Will this make the HD programming suffer too?

 

[Scott Merryfield]

A cable TV signal is the lowest resolution video signal you will feed to your TV (except VHS, if you are still using that). The bigger the TV screen, the worse a low resolution video signal will look, since you are spreading the same number of lines of resolution over a greater area.

As for HDTV, if your cable company is transmitting such signals (and consider yourself very lucky if they are), the video quality will be much improved, since HDTV is a much higher resolution signal than standard NTSC.

 

[Dave Getson]

Have you tried your smaller TV using the same cable as your big TV. If the picture quality is just as bad on the smaller one when it's downstairs, maybe you could get the cable company in to look at it. Could be something out of whack with the cable going downstairs?

 

[John Garcia]

The bigger the TV screen, the worse a low resolution video signal will look, since you are spreading the same number of lines of resolution over a greater area.

I believe this is your issue. RPTVs also tend to be a bit less tollerant of poor quality images, especially the larger you go, which is why I don't own one.

 

[Lee L]

If you have digital cable, the digital satellite will probably not look any better. It is possible you have a cable prvider that is compressing the signal more than usual but I doubt it. Keep in mind that you 65 inch is just a little less that twice the diagonal measurement of your 36. The RPTV has a built in line doubler so all teh artifacts and problems look twice the size at least vertically, when compared to the NTSC TV. Also, the crt's in the RPTV are sharper than the the tube in your NTSC, allowing you to see all the bad stuff with that much more detail. The limitations of the good ole NTSC system and your TV are acting like a dithering filter.

To really see, you should hook up an antenna if you do not have one on the NTSC input of your set and compare one of you locals one night between the cable and the ant. I will be willing to bet you can see a difference.

I have Dish Network and definitely see the problems on my TV. If you have analog cable, then you might see an improvement.

 

[LaMarcus]

Actually the digital looks a lot better than when I have analog. It's just $hitty on a few channels, HBO and Showtime look good depending on what tv mode I have it on. As long as the contrast is down it hides some of the imperfections.

 

[John-Miles]

get the cable company to check your signal strength, I did with mine and the cable guy ended up having to pull down the line running from the road and put up another one cause water had gotten into it, the signal strength jumped about 16 dB when he did that, very noticable improvement.

 

[LaMarcus]

Allan actually gave some sound advice. I followed his suggestion and there was a noticeable improvement. I would recommend this to anyone experiencing similar problems.
I'm going to also try that signal strength suggestion to see if there's any that needs to be done.
Thanks for all the replies , I appreciate it.