My wife bought me a Samsung LT-P1745 17" LCD Television for my birthday. Setting it up with a regular coax cable input and from distances less than 7 to 10 feet, the image appears very fuzzy, objects blocky and overall it’s somewhat snowy. From distances over 10 feet the picture quality looks pretty good. Thinking I had a weak cable signal I tried multiple hookups around the house and am getting the same result. This is this how LCD TVs are or did I get a bum TV? Reading reviews of this model around the internet lead me to believe the TV is crap.
Did the coax come with the unit or did you put it together yourself? One tiny wire from the shield might touch or even come near the copper center wire and cause problems.
The quality of the coax can make a huge difference. Is the last run of cable that thin, RG-59 crap with push on connectors or is the much thicker quad shielded RG-6 with threaded connectors which are properly crimpled onto the cable.
RG-6 isn’t necessarily quad-shielded (most isn’t), and RG-59 isn’t necessarily crap. The quality of the cable is independent of which specification it meets.
The coax was put in place by Comcast and looks like it is good quality. Also, the TV that this one is replacing (a 7 year-old 12" CRT) looked very clear on the same cable.
I also hooked up the LCD to a DVD player using RCA cables. That looked like crap as well. Again close up lots of distortion, from far away it looked better. The DVD still looked better than the cable signal but CRTs blew it out of the water with both signal sures.
So, I am now sure this TV is bum, so my question becomes, are all lower quality (under $500, non High Def) LCDs going to have this same problem or should my wife have done more research?
It really sucks. A hell of a gift idea, I felt like a jerk telling her I want to return it.
Without actually seeing it, I hesitate to offer any opinion. I will say that when displaying a non-HD signal, an HD LCD will look worse than a non-HD LCD, for the same reason that an LCD computer monitor looks bad when set to a non-native resolution. So it’s not the fact that the thing isn’t HD that’s the problem.
It’s been my experience that RG-6 and thread on connectors can deliver a better signal than thinner cable and push on connectors but that may not be the problem.
I did a search and faound that TV has 1280x1024 resolution. I don’t get any artifacts from my hi def TV when watching an NTSC signal but I’m using composite inputs for both cable box and DVD. You may have better lucking using these inputs but you’ll need three RCA cables for the video from the DVD player rather than using the composite RCA with the yellow jack.
Does the TV require you to run a setup so it knows what kind of signals it is getting?
That I didn’t try, but it wouldn’t make much difference since I’m only interested in straight cable (no cable box) and I’m not hooking it to a DVD player in the long run. The TV is meant to sit in my kitchen so I can watch while I cook and clean up the dishes.
There was no automatic forced set-up, although according to the instructions, there should have been. I did mess around the menus myself and besides selecting the source (ie, Coax, Components, AV, S-Video) there was an option under the “Setup” menu labeled “AIR/CATV”. The choices were Air, STD, HRC, IRC. As I understood it, I wanted STD but setting it to any of these made no difference, except for Air which was all static since I had no anteanee.