Poor Picture with Dark Scenes on DVD (1 Viewer)

[Mike_Keg]

First I'd like to say Hello and that this is a very nice community you guys have going. I can't seem to get straight answers from anyone regarding my picture problem so hopefully some of you will have some insight.

During playback of DVD's my picture is great unless there is a scene which is dimly lit. For example, a scene where people are sitting around a campfire. When viewing this type of scene some of the darker shaded areas appear to have the color distorted. It almost looks like a picture that has been solarized, some of the darker areas of the picture appear to be a greenish tint and others appear to be blueish, it's very weird and makes watching these scenes very difficult. A scene that might show a close-up of someone's face lit only from one side by a campfire or any soft light causes the problem every time. The more brightly lit side of the face will look normal while the other side looses accurate representation of the color. Often these strange colors that appear in darker areas of the screen appear to be pixilated. During a recent viewing of American Wedding, the Stiffler/Jim's grandmother scene was totally lost during playback. The only thing I was able to make out were the lightest areas of the shot which showed up as pixilated greenish colored areas of the screen. When I watched this scene on my other projection television I could clearly make out figures. I'm not sure if I've accurately described the problem I am having in enough detail so if more detail is needed please let me know. The components I am using in my video setup are as follows.

Toshiba Theater Wide 57H83 HD Projection Television
Yamaha DV-C6660 DVD Player
Acoustic Research Component Cables

I know some projection sets have problems accurately representing black in high contrast situations but I'm not so sure it's my television since I have never noticed the problem while watching broadcast television on that set and I do not have this problem on my older non-HD projection set that is using S-Video for DVD playback. My only guess is that it's the Acoustic Research Component Cables I bought. These Acoustic Research cables were about half the price of the other brand cables for sale at the local A/V store and I probably shouldn't have skimped since I had already dropped a load of money on the other components in my system but as I am sure many people do, I said, "These should work just fine". So, I'm looking for opinions on possible causes before I go unbundling cables and swapping different pieces of equipment from room to room for troubleshooting. Is it most likely the cables or could it be something else such as my television or DVD player? I've searched through all sorts of video forums online and have found no mention of anything that even came close to my problem. I can't be the only one experiencing this!

Any opinions/suggested are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time.

Mike Kegley

 

[Jack Briggs]

Welcome to HTF, Mike. Offhand, I'd say your display is not tracking 6,500K faithfully at low light levels. This is common. Ever consider a professional calibration?

 

[Lew Crippen]

I agree with Jack in that your display is the most likely cause. It is also possible that it is your DVD player (either of these because you are reporting consistent problems). I think it less likely that it will be your cables, but until you do some swapping you won’t know for sure.

Regrettably I think that you will have to troubleshoot. Let us know what you find-I’m quite interested.

 

[John S]

Does your DVD Player have a black level adjustment, does this have any bearing on the issue at all???

 

[Mike_Keg]

Thank you for the replies, looks like I'm going to end up doing some device/cable swapping when I get home from work this evening. I'll be sure to post the findings of my tests tomorrow. I did purchase the extended warranty with this set so from what my warranty documentation says, if calibration is needed it should come free of charge. I don't think my DVD player has a black level adjustment but I'll be sure to double check it tonight.

 

[ChrisWiggles]

If you're not tracking grayscale correctly, which is most normal on not professinoally calibrated sets, it's usually not very visible unless you are extremely picky, and any mistrack will be pretty much the same across the entire screen, and biased towards one color usually. If you're getting strange patterns of colors, or shifting and changing color oddities, this may be something else.

 

[Mike_Keg]

Just wanted to let everyone know that I got around to troubleshooting my problems this weekend and I'm happy to say the problem is solved! Turns out that my Yamaha DVD player has a few preset picture settings which were causing the problem. I ditched the presets and manually adjusted the settings while the player was paused on a scene with the weird color/pixelation problem. There was one preset color scheme called "Soft" that also relived the problem. For future reference I believe the color setting my player was set on while I was experiencing the problem was called "Rich".

Thanks for the help.