DISH vs. LD vs. cable vs. VHS on a widescreen RPTV (1 Viewer)

[Matt_Stevens]

I got my 47" Panasonic HDTV in yesterday morning and have been tweaking since I turned it on. So far, I got 480p DVD looking damn good, LD looks not very good, cable and especially VHS looks pretty bad. Very grainy, snowy, noisy, with a lot of color bleeding. I know I have much more work to do before I can give up on VHS and SVHS.
But my question is this: How will DISH look on this set? Will it look about like cable, or better? The unstable, grainy, noisy image of VHS and some cable stations is unwatchable to me and I am hoping DISH would look a heck of a lot better.
(also posted at AVS forum)
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www.deceptions.net/superman

 

[Todd Hochard]

Dish should look a bit better than analog cable. Still not as good as DVD. I have Dish, and my dishplayer looks a bit better than the analog cable signal.
It's as if the analog cable has too much noise, and is making the line doubler work overtime, exaggerating the problem.
Try this- if you have a JVC 7xxx or 9xxx with the frame buffer memory, run the cable coax directly into the VCR, and use the VCR as a tuner. For me, this cleans up the analog cable quite a bit.
NOTE: even on "digital cable," the first 100 or so channels are typically analog.
For reference, I have the Elite 510HD.
Todd

 

[DaveD]

Matt, run your tv in game mode it disables the line doubler try that to improve the picture quality on a poorer signal.

 

[Gary_E]

Matt,
I have a Toshiba 40H80. The Over-The-Air and C-Band satellite signal on the Toshiba varies from feed to feed but normally it's very good. Satellite and OTA signals are feed to the Toshiba through COMPOSITE cables (no S-Video or componet outputs).
My LDs looked crappy until I activated the TV's 3:2 pulldown and switched from S-Video to COMPOSITE cables. It seems for whatever reason the Toshiba line doubler likes the COMPOSITE signal from my Pioneer 3010 LD player(no componet outputs). There was a tremendous difference in the LD image after I made these changes.
Check out www.hometheaterspot.com. There are entire forums pertaining to individual manufacturers. There's much Panasonic 47" HDTV information there.
-Gary

 

[Matt_Stevens]

Thanks for the replies. I am using my JVC 7800 for the receiver, but quality still suffers greatly. Some channels look better in TV mode and some look better in GAME mode. The issue for me is the noise. There is so much grain like noise (lots of blue & red noise) on some stations and on ANY VHS/SVHS tape, that I cannot watch without cringing.
What really sucks is that SVHS recordings of 16x9 DVD's are almost no better. In FULL mode, which does the squeeze, you are unable to turn the doubler off, so SVHS's analog flaws are exaggerated. So my SVHS collection is pretty much bust, unless I can improve the picture. Thoe tapes were wonderful on my Wega.
I am using S-Video from the VCR and Composite from the Pioneer CLD-704 LD player. Laserdiscs look very noisy and digitized when zoomed in, to properly show ltbx transfers. LD's like METROPOLIS and GOTCHA, which are 1.33:1, look pretty good, because they do not have to be zoomed in (though I won't be using the 1.33:1 mode very much during the first few months to avoid burnin).
1.85:1 and 2.35:1 transfers suffer greatly from the Zoom-in. HIGHLANDER "THX", which is a grainy film, is a very fine transfer on my 27" Trinitron and on my no longer owned 36" Wega. But zoomed in on my Panny, it suffers from a ghastly amount of noise and a pixalized look, as the Zoom is clearly digital in nature. TRUE LIES DTS looks slightly better and RETURN OF THE JEDI THX looks better still, but ALL laserdiscs show noise and Zooming artifacts when in Zoom mode. SUSPIRIA, which was a glorious LD on my Wega, is a color bleeding, noise ridden mess on the Panny.

SUPERMAN looks like a fog bank (but the DVD looks perty damn good).
Suggestions? I knew that a lower end HDTV like this would need work, so I am prepared to do it, but I sure as hell hope I can actually improve what I have so far because it is not acceptable. Having DVD and HDTV look great and everything else NOT isn't good enough for 2 grand. Especially when getting HDTV content is pretty much next to impossible (who the hell wants to watch Diagnosis Murder?).
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