Sony Bravia KDL-26M3000 (1 Viewer)

[DanielBH]

I've been researching and working on this 26 inch, 720p LCD for 5 days now, and it still has problems. Given my frustration level, I'm just going to throw this out; any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Two chief problems remain. One is the cable signal. I don't have the HD cable package yet, so this is just Standard stuff. I've tried the S-Video hook-up; but the co-axial cable actually looks better, so I've stuck with it. And everything I mention here was viewed from 10 feet back, so I don't think it's a problem with the 720p.

The chief problem is that some programs have a skipping problem. It's not tiling; it's an actual skip where it appears like the footage was spliced into a clean break. A related problem is often a kind of echo effect as things move on the screen (after-images trail thus making it a very psychedelic experience).

I discovered that my Noise Reduction was at maximum, and turning Noise Reduction to off corrected the problem in most instances. However, the problem still exists on occasion, and it's not even channel specific! I can be watching CSI on Spike TV, and it looks great; but Star Trek: Voyager will come on, and it has the skipping problem. Outer Limits on Sci-Fi Channel will have the echo effect; Stargate SG-1 will come on after and look fine.

So am I missing something here? Didn't know if any of you guys had run across this kind of thing before.

The second problem is the DVD player. I have a Yamaha DV-C6860 5 disc carousel with progressive scanning. I have the DVD player set to progressive and the component cables plugged in. Most of the time, it seems to work great; in fact, Star Trek: First Contact was crisp and in 3D when it played. However, I tried to watch Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith last night, and it was unwatchable. It's a bit hard to describe why; I suppose the best term would be out of focus.

Anyway, my question is this - am I going to have to adjust the television's settings for every individual DVD I watch? Are the days of just popping something in the player now gone? As it is, I've already used up one of two programmable slots for the DVD input to make animation look better; I had to set Sharpness to zero in order to get anything animated to play smoothly on DVD.

So that's where I am. I have to say that this television has made me feel really, really stupid for not being able to make it work; it's so far just more trouble than it's worth. And what's better, I know I'll probably have to go through all of this crap again once I do get an HD signal coming in.

Maybe I'm misguided, but I feel that television shouldn't be something you have to go to war with every time you sit down. After some very brief initial set up, I never had to fight with my old, antiquated tube.

 

[MichaelEl]

Yes, and probably for every TV program as well.

Based on what I've seen, LCDs are very sensitive to the combination of contrast, sharpness, and noise control. Just a little off with one setting, and you lose focus and/or the picture becomes noisy. Since video quality varies widely from DVD to DVD and program to program, the settings are never going to be quite right initially, and finding a happy medium that will work worth with everything is difficult, if not impossible.

My advice is: use a reference DVD and set up the brightness, color, and backlight at some desired level, ignoring the sharpness of the picture. (Actually, you should probably just leave the backlight at the default setting, as reducing the current can damage the bulb.) Then, start lowering the contrast from the middle until the image looks as sharp as you can get it. Finally, adjust the sharpness and noise reduction to further fine tune the image. Once everything looks as good as possible, all you will need to do in the future is make slight changes to the contrast, sharpness, and noise control.