Horrible Artifacting on Sci Atlanta Explorer 8300HD (1 Viewer)

[Chris Svensson]

Now at my home, I have a 56" Sammy HLN DLP and a beautiful HD Tivo (HDR-250). Picture is spotlessly clean and even SD material looks great. I have the two connected via HDMI/DVI.

Now I get to my mother's place, and I just recommended she pick up a Sammy DLP (her's is an HLP series I believe... purchaced at Circuit City about two weeks ago) and it seems there are some differences. She also has hers married to a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD via component hookups.

I'm seeing absolutely horrid picture artifacting and certainly less than stellar SD representation. I've noticed that her TV model has done away with the Farouja chip that mine has and thought that might have something to do with it. I'm also going to pick up an HDMI cable today to see if it has to do with the D->A conversion.

I switched her output to the native 720p of the display. I messed with some of the picture settings to try and improve the color and sharpness, but the artifacts remain and the picture is incredibly grainy. My mother is happy with the picture (and HD material looks fine) but her SD stuff is almost unwatchable (including SD material rebroadcast over HD channels like HD locals).

Anyone have any thoughts as to a fix/what the culprit might be?

 

[MichaelPR]

Hi I use the same STB on my Toshiba DLP.....I am actually really really impressed with the picture this thing puts out compared to the last box cablevision gave me....I also find for some funny reason that 1080i looks much much better than 720p...I have it hooked up using components.

 

[Tom McA]

Mine looks fine. (SA8300 from Time Warner Cable with a Sony 34" XBR tube) There are too many possible culprits for me to presume to guess what's causing your problem, tho. Poor scaling in the cable box, heavy compression at your cable head end, D to A conversion, etc, etc

TWC told me that the HDMI jack is "not supported at this time", so I'm using component. Idunno whether that means HDMI works but it's buggy, or it doesn't work at all. You may want to check into that before you shell out for a cable.

I found my picture looks better when I let the cable box spit out native signals and let the TV figure out how best to display them, rather than forcing the box to convert everything to one output line standard. YMMV. The only downside is that channel changes are a little slower this way, since the TV has to figure out what it's looking at when you flip from, say, a 720p channel to a SD channel.