Re: New LCD TV

[This followup was posted to sci.electronics.repair and a copy was sent
to the cited author.]

In article <1165706064.326732.148440@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
LittleItaly125@xxxxxxxxx says...
I don't know if this is the right place to ask this question, but I'll
ask it anyway. I just bought a $2,000 dollar Sony 40" 1080 LCD tv
(Sony KDL-40V2500). We don't have an HD box, but do have some nice
Monster cables and all of that stuff. When I hooked up my DirectTV box
to the tv, the picture quality is absolutely horrible, even worse than
my old crappy tv. The dvd's look pretty good, but nothing like it did
in the store.

When I turn on a dvd it flashes 480i in the left corner. I'm not a
genius, but isn't that pretty bad? How do i get the resolution higher
than that? Anything will help. Thanks in advance.

480i is SD (standard definition) TV. If your DVD player supports it, you
can change it to 480p, but it may not make much of a difference. DVD's
are natively 480i, and 480p requires the player to do some upconversion
of it's own. This oddly can cause some LOSS of horizontal resolution.

One issue with fixed resolution TV's is that they must convert any input
to their native resolution. In the case of SD inputs, they often do all
sorts of processing in an attempt to make it look higher res than it is.
480(i or p) is about 704 or 720 horizontally. (1280x720 and 1920x1080
are the HD formats.) Upconverting does not actually increase resolution.
If the data is not there originally, you cannot recover it. All
upconverting does is GUESS what to fill in the 'missing' information by
using nearby pixels to average out something.

On top of that, most TV's also boost sharpness, which has the side
effect of also boosting noise.

For your TV, I would NOT use the VIVID settting, which just exaggerates
noise and other issues. Use Custom and turn down the sharpness.

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Relevant Pages

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    ... In my case I have a RCA DLP whose native resolution is 720P. ... > An upconverting DVD player is generally not neccessary as the display will ... > That said my 480P DVD player looks stunning on my HDTV. ... Denon is considered by many to be top of the line. ...
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