Loewe Aconda & Progressive scan input --Bad? (1 Viewer)

[Erich_Weidner]

I've a 38" Aconda, and am very pleased with it. I've attempted to calibrate it myself using only user menues and the DVE disk. I've heard claim that the Aconda looks best with a non-progressive scan DVD player vs. a progressive scan unit.

When I first hooked up a new Denon 2815 in progressive mode, it looked terrible, though I discovered that this was due mostly to the fact that the settings for the progressive component input were way off, resetting them to defaults drastically improved things. Playing further, I noted that (The Fifth Element Superbit version) the screen text in the opening few scenes ("200 Years Later", etc.) were almost unreadably blurry. This didn't happen when the 2815 was switched to non-progressive mode (and the Aconda set for non progressive input).
I replaced the 2815 with a Denon 2910, and the blurriness was gone, so I'm wondering if this means that the problem was the "de-interlacer" on the 2815 vs. the (highly rated on the Secrets site) 2910?

So the question is, by using the 2910 in progressive mode am I bypassing all the cool stuff that makes the Loewe a Loewe? I mean, it still looks great, and I can't see a difference between non-progressive mode vs. progressive mode from the 2910 (at least with what I've watched so far), but still I wonder...

Can anyone shed some light on this? Have any other Loewe owners out there played around with progressive vs. not inputs? (I'm using component video for both cases, btw).

 

[Allan Jayne]

>>> I replaced the 2815 [DVD player] with a Denon 2910 and the blurriness was gone.

I am puzzled. That should tell the whole story, except according to the Stacy Spears' Secrets Shootout, the 2815 has an excellent de-interlacer by Faroudja. Maybe your player may have been defective, or perhaps there was a loose cable connection. (When you feed progressive to the TV, the TV's de-interlacing is skipped and the picture quality relies on what the DVD player can deliver.)

How are your cables? Sending the video from DVD player to TV as progressive, cable deficiences are more likely to show up.

Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm

 

[Erich_Weidner]

This may have been the case. The symptom was only visible with the 2815 in progressive scan mode. While outputting non-progressive the text on the screen was not blurry.

Cables were the same for all these tests (monster-way-to-expensive-cables).

I still wonder how to determine if the TV's deinterlacer is better than the Denon 2910's? And, by bypassing the Loewe's deinterlacer, have I just defeated the stuff that makes the Loewe look like it does? (It is very difficult to compare scenes from DVD's as the input setup for the Loewe (doesn't have two sets of component inputs). It takes a good 30 seconds to wade through the menues of the Denon and the Loewe to switch between progressive and non-progressive modes. One answer which occurs to me is, if I can't tell, why should I care. But then I wouldn't be hanging out here if that were the case.

 

[John S]

Some sets just work better with their own internal high quality de-interlacer / scaler. I have seen it quite a few times now, helping people.

One of those sort of cool the display works so well with 480i source, not so cool you don't benefit any from higher end DVD players though.


Just hard to say really.

 

[Allan Jayne]

The quick way to tell which de-interlacer is better is to just compare the picture quality! If the difference is slight, you may not want to bother with exhaustive viewing tests such as Stacy Spears did.

Obvious deficiences seen in de-interlacers are:

* When subjects start moving, areas or even all of the still background next to them become blurry.

* Frequent serrated or feathered sides of horizontal moving subjects.

Do you have the AVIA test disk? Check out the horizontal and vertical resolution using its 200 TVL test pattern. (Video Essentials does not go high enough). All de-interlacers have a "pixel width". If the pixel width is insufficient, horizontal resolution will suffer.