When I’ve been in my local big box stores lately I’m always very unimpressed by their big expensive TVs. Plasma, LCD, whatever, they’ve always got terrible looking pictures.
I’ve always chalked this up to the employees at the stores not really caring enough to bother doing adjustments and tuning things properly.
However, now I’m visiting mom for Chrismas. She’s got a largish HDTV Sony WEGA TV. Last I heard, that was supposed to be a pretty good combo.
Their HDTV antenna (I didn’t know you needed those) doesn’t work, so we’re dealing with a non-HD signal here. The thing is, the picture is not very good. It’s not fuzzy, but it looks almost blocky in a pixelated way - if you’ve watched enough VCDs and the like you know what I mean.
As a nice thing for Mom for Christmas I’d like to get this thing calibrated - is there something wrong here? Or are the new expensive TVs not actually particularly good? My 32" Toshiba I bought in 1999 has a much better picture than this thing…
SD (Standard Definition) on HDTV looks like ass. One of the most-frequently cited reasons for returns of HDTVs is “the picture doesn’t look as good at home as it did in the store.” This is because the store is piping an HD signal into the TV, whereas the customer is often using SD.
BTW, you mentioned not being impressed by the HDTVs in the big-box stores. This may be because you are really close to the screen – far closer, often, than you would be in your house.
I suspect that your mom’s problem is the SD signal. Because the signal lacks enough information to drive the individual pixels of the TV, it’s using each signal pixel to cover several screen pixels, resulting in a picture that looks blocky. One test you could do is taking a look at how it handles DVDs, assuming she has a progressive-scan DVD player. If those look notably better, then the problem is the source, not the set.
I’m going to guess, though, and go with **Burrido **on this one – she needs an HD signal. Satellite TV or digital cable.
Is her HDTV a widescreen model? I know that often the widescreen models are set to stretch a 4:3 SD signal, which just looks terrible. Set it to black bars at the side will help quite a bit, if you are play a SD signal.
Braniac4 is right on with this. Unless your disappointed in the picture for say color, tint, or brightness, then adjustments aren’t going to make any difference.
If you want to see what that Sony is capable of play a Pixar DVD (Finding Nemo, Incredibles, Bug’s Life, etc.) on it with a progressive scan dvd player hooked up with component cables.
That’s one of the main reasons the TV industry is going hi-def. Big TVs are getting cheaper and more people are buying them. Unfortunately, the bigger you make a picture the worse looking it will get. You say your 32" looks better than her Sony. That’s because it’s smaller.
If she want’s a better picture for watching regular network television she’s going to have to pay the extra for Hi-Def cable service, Hi-Def satellite service, or get an antenna and Hi-Def receiver.
Standard signals won’t ever look good on these sets.
<nitpick> You may not need a digital decoder to recieve OTA HD broadcasts. If your local station broadcasts in HD and your television has a built in tuner, it is fopefully a built in HD tuner. Check your individual TV’s model into type stuff for further. (ATSC vs NTSC) <nitpick>
What is her primary source? Digital cable/satellite, or off-air antenna?
I’ve got an XBR Wega, and you can easily tell which channels on Dish Network get decent bitrates and others are more highly compressed by the blockiness to the image.
As for calibrating - yes, for around $250, you can get what’s called an ISF calibration done. For around a tenth of the price, you can get better than halfway there using a setup DVD such as the *Avia Guide to Home Theatre * or Digital Video Essentials.
The image on most in-store display sets is cranked up so it jumps out at you - hardly the way you want it to look at home.
Also, some HD cable boxes are terrible with SD analog, because they convert everything to digital, so you start with the standard SD image which is already pretty bad, then convert it to digital and compress it, whch adds artifacts. To make matters worse, depending on the type of TV they have, the TV itself will then ‘scale’ the picture to the TV’s size, introducing yet more artifacts.
But done right, a big-screen TV looks great. I play SD TV images on a 92" wide screen, and on the right station it looks great - almost DVD quality.
Finally, the screen size, resolution, and viewing distance have to be matched. A 40" standard TV picture probably looks best from about 12 feet away. Any closer, and you start seeing artifacts like scan lines, compression blocks, etc. The same size HDTV picture will look great from less than half that distance, giving you a very immersive experience.
Beware cheap ‘HDTV capable’ sets. Some of these are just junk. My mother was visiting and loved my projection image, so when she went home she went out and box a big screen ‘HDTV’. She paid something like $1100, the cheapest set she could find. And she hates it. The picture is dim, unfocused, has no contrast, and the screen has so much gain that if you sit in the center of the image the sides look noticeably dimmer, and people sitting even slightly off to the sides see a much dimmer picture. If she had spent even $500 more, she would have got a dramatically better set, but she just didn’t know how to shop for one of these units.
I don’t get it. Assuming the image spans the same angle when viewing, how could a higher resolution display look WORSE than a lower resolution display driving the same signal? I frequently watch SD tv shows on my 1600x1200 monitor sitting about 20 inches away and I haven’t noticed any blockiness or poor image quality compared to my CRT TV. Are they using some especially crappy interpolation algorithm?
Take a 17" lcd computer monitor with a native resolution of 1280x1024, and set the resolution to 1024x768. Looks like crap, doesn’t it? That’s because you can’t map a 1024x768 signal onto a 1280x1024 display pixel for pixel, and so you’ve got a lot of pixels caught between, as it were. CRT monitors avoid this, because they don’t have native resolutions, and actually display fewer pixels when you set the resolution lower, but LCDs can’t do that.
Exactly the same thing is happening on a flatscreen hdtv running a low-def signal. With really good interpolation algorithms, it can look okay (though never as good as a non-hd flatscreen with the same signal), but in my experience a lot of these things have crappy interpolation and look really horrible with ordinary signals.
I have a Sony Grand Wega 55" and I did notice the blockiness on regular broadcast and realized it was due to my trying to stretch the 3:4 image out to fill up the whole screen. If it got too distracting I suppose I could flip to “normal” display mode, but I never do so I guess I got used to it right quick. I got the thing mainly for widescreen DVD viewing anyway.
Who needs the big screen experience for Golden Girls reruns, anyway?
They’ve got DirecTV. However, like I said, their HD antenna doesn’t work, or at least I’m told. Basically, they told my step-father that it had about a 50/50 chance of working and, oh well, looks like you’re one of the unlucky ones.
Is adding HD to a standard DirecTV subscription just a matter of telling them you want it and adding an extra fee? Was that HD antenna just for the local channels, and, if so, is there a DirecTV channel I can try out to see how that looks?
The WEGA has something like 9 sets of inputs on it (or at least appears to have when you’re cycling through them). According to the DirecTV installer he told them that they couldn’t put anything other than the DTV onto the unit because of the HDTV. First off they don’t have HDTV going on as far as I know…but even if they did, that guy’s excuse IS a total load of crap, right?
If they have Direct TV and want to get HiDef Direct TV they’ll need a different dish, a different receiver box, and will pay more per month.
A HiDef antenna will only pick up your local stations and still you need a hi-def receiver. Either the WEGA has one built in or you need a seperate box. The majority of hi-def sets do NOT have built in receivers.
And even if you do have an antenna and receiver for the local stations, not everything they broadcast is in hidef. Usually only primetime stuff, sports, and Leno/Letterman.
Thats only really true with static images with lots of straight lines and pixel aligned fonts. For TV shows, a 1280 LCD looks fine, I don’t see why a TV wouldn’t.