New Sony DVD Player's picture is dark. (1 Viewer)

[Kendall T]

I just bought a Sony RDR-GX355 recorder yesterday. It is replacing another Sony player that is about 4-5 years old.

I set it up last night and the picture is very dark. I put my DVE disk in to recalibrate it and had to turn the brightness up all the way and it still isn't enough per DVE. Watching a DVD with the brightness all the way up (but not set per DVE) is tolerable, but when I switch to my satellite, it is way too bright.

I have it hooked to my tv via some Rocket Fish (Best Buy house brand, which I was told are good cables) component cables. Is there any logical reason this is happening with the same brand player?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. Sony was no help with this question, as expected.

 

[Ed Moxley]

I'd take it back and get another one. If the next one does the same thing, try another brand.
Good luck!

 

[LanceJ]

Is the dvd player's internal brightness control set correctly?

 

[Kendall T]

Thanks for the ideas lads....turns out it was a setting in my tv.

There is a setting that I have never been able to change before called "Color Matrix". The two choices are "SD" and "HD". What I learned in my manual yesterday is that it is only selectable with a 480p signal. My old DVD player was not a progressive scan unit so I've never been able to change this setting until now. My tv was set to "SD" and now it is set to "HD".

The thing that is strange though is that the player defaults the progressive signal as "off" when new. The first time I plugged it in and played a DVD, it was still set to off, and the screen was still dark. Strange.

 

[LanceJ]

It's "strange" only because you're thinking like an HT enthusiast , rather than one of the millions & millions of Average Joes who don't own a digital TV (SD or HD capable), which is what is required for a prog scan signal to work.

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That is sort of the same reason this happens: when a conventional dvd-video player downmixes a 5.1 Dolby signal to stereo so it can be output via the RCA analog jacks, since these will most likely be connected directly to a TV that has only small lightly-built speakers, the player leaves out the LFE signal - the .1 part - of that surround track so that extreme low frequency and/or high level bass signals won't cause those speakers to be overloaded and distort. This is why some soundtrack engineers throw in some extra (higher frequency) bass in the other channels to provide such viewers with some bass to help "thicken" the sound.

 

[Kendall T]

What I meant that was strange was that the picture was dark, even with PS off. In theory, if it was off, my TV's picture should have looked exactly the same as it did with my old player.

 

[LanceJ]

Someone better versed in video technology might know more about this, but maybe the output voltage/current (of the component output which is an analog format) of the new dvd player might be lower than the older one, causing the darker image? This is a common issue in the audio world when dealing with CD players, turntables, etc.