Big TV's and UPC digital

steeo

I have a HD ready Sony Bravia 40" LCD tv along with a UPC digital pack.

The picture isn't the best and will not pick up the digital signal that UPC are charging me for. I had one of the UPC repair men out yesterday and he said the poor quality picture is down to the size of the tv.

Does anyone else have a similar problem ??? or is the repair man talking BS.

Mossy Monk

The tv wont pick up the digital signal?

Are you using a digital set top box or using the tv's internal tuner. If it is the latter then of course it wont pick up a signal as that would be a terrestrial tuner.

If it is the former then that is a problem with the digital set top box.

The poor picture would however be due to both UPC and the television size.

dave13

Its down to how compressed the UPC image is. I have a 32" Sony and I think the image at that size is just about acceptable. Watching sport is still pretty poor on it though(very fuzzy)

paulm17781

I have a 40" at home and it's fine. That said, my TV has pretty decent upscaling.

SteM

wonderboy wrote: »

I have a 32" Sony and I think the image at that size is just about acceptable. Watching sport is still pretty poor on it though(very fuzzy)

It is? I find sport on Sky Sports to be fine on my Tosh 37". Football on Setanta Sports is bad but I think that's down to Setanta in general rather than UPC.

bk

steeo wrote: »

Does anyone else have a similar problem ??? or is the repair man talking BS.

First thing you need to remember is that UPC are transmitting a Standard Definition resolution, while your TV is a High Definition TV, this means it will take the SD picture and blow it up in size to fit the HD TV.

Of course this will show any defects in the SD picture, think of what happens when you take an old photograph and then try and print it off on an A4 sheet, it ends up looking awful.

steeo

So if i wanted a better picture the only way is to go with Sky ??? as UPC dont do a HD service, and won't be for the for-seeable future.

Mark#1

Isn't "up-scaling" supposed to help with this?

IIUC, the SD signal is "interlaced" to fill in the gaps, so-to-speak?

If your TV does up-scale, shouldn't your picture be better than you seem to be experiencing?

Mark

JDxtra

It also depends how far away you are from the TV. Sitting right in front of an LCD, you'll see how rubbish the compression can be (Sky or UPC - some channels worse than others). But sit back on the sofa and you might not spot any problems.

The bigger the TV, the more noticeable the compression will be (blockyness on complex pictures etc).

stevenmu

The cause kind of depends on what exactly is wrong with the picture. A bad signal will result in extreme blockyness and possibly jumping and skipping and the audio going out of sync. Fuzzyness, blurryness, motion blur, poor colour etc are more down to the TV.

One very common problem that a lot of people have and don't seem to even realise is that LCD TVs tend to be very poorly configured out of the box. They are generally configured for display in a shop so things like brightness and colour levels are bumped way up to compete with other TVs and with the flourescent lighting. Generally a lot of the crappy image processing routines are left on by default as well.

The first thing you should do is look for your model number on http://www.avforums.com/. There'll almost certainly be at least one thread dedicated specifically to your TV, and quite possibly one specifically for settings. Have a look at the settings being recommended and try them out.

Some general guidelines are:
-Turn off any of the fancy image processing options, they usually cause more problems than they solve.
-If your TV has different presets like Dynamic/Standard/Movie etc, try changing between them, generally movie gives the best picture, dynamic the worst, don't pay attention to brightness/colour/contrast etc yet, you can tweak them after, just look for smoothness and clarity.
-Reduce brightness, colour etc way down, they're probably some where around 80/90, they should be closer to 50. It'll look very dim/pale at first but give it 30 minutes or so to get used to it then adjust as again as needed. You might want to leave contrast relatively high.
-Particularly reduce the backlight down alot (if you don't have individual controls for this try enabling power saving modes)
-Turn off dynamic contrast
-Try out the image processing things again now if you like, but just enable one at a time to have a good idea of what they do.


I have a 46" LCD and when I took it out of the box the picture would have made me ill if I looked at very long, but after following the settings on the site above UPC digital looks stunning, at times it's not that far off HD.

zilog_jones

stevenmu wrote: »

One very common problem that a lot of people have and don't seem to even realise is that LCD TVs tend to be very poorly configured out of the box. They are generally configured for display in a shop so things like brightness and colour levels are bumped way up to compete with other TVs and with the flourescent lighting. Generally a lot of the crappy image processing routines are left on by default as well.

+1

The default settings were awful on my TV compared to now. THX Certified DVDs have a menu thing for setting up your TV properly - very helpful. Are there any PAL THX Certified DVDs though (mine's Region 1 NTSC, never seen a PAL one)?

Also, make sure your set-top box is outputting RGB video and you're using a SCART input on your TV that can handle RGB (it's often only the first socket that can) - composite video is very blurry in comparison and particularly awful looking on big LCD/plasma TVs.

Isn't "up-scaling" supposed to help with this?

Upscaling is a necessity on HDTVs. If it wasn't upscaled there'd be a tiny picture in the middle of your screen. A PAL SD picture is 576 lines high (DVD is 720x576 but there's usually no pixels as such as you're getting an analogue output through RGB SCART or whatever), and your HDTV is probably 768 lines or 1080 lines (if full HD) - the SD picture needs to be resized to fill this. Of course as these numbers do not divide into each other there's blurring of lines, and you need to de-interlace the video as LCD/plasma displays are progressive scan, so if anything you're losing quality from upscaling. It's not as bad if you have a progressive scan source (e.g. progressive scan DVD player showing film content, games console with progressive output), but this isn't an option with cable or satellite TV (unless HD).

watty

If the picture is less than perfect then upscaling can make it look worse!

Some (many) So called HD ready sets are really WXGA 1366x768 monitors with cheap rubbish upscalers. For 1080i (the only HD currently transmitted) they deinterlace by throwing away one field and then upscaling the resultant 540 lines to 768. 720p HD (not transmitted in Europe currently) is either shown with back bars or badly rescaled to 768. These sets usually create a lot of artifacts on SD (576 line) and often optimised for NTSC 480 line.

Better 1366 x 768 sets are often better than SD LCDs (non HDReady) for regular TV, but still poorer than a cheap CRT never mind a good one.

If you have larger LCD/Plasma you really need Satellite or look for a good S/H Sony 32" or 36" CRT.

HD is NEVER EVER 768 lines, proving that 768 lines TV are really PC screen based. The HDReady logo program is thus worthless.

zilog_jones

watty wrote: »

The HDReady logo program is thus worthless.

They're still capable of displaying HDTV in some form or another, unlike the large majority of CRT sets and SD LCD/plasma displays. Just because they can't show 1080i/p with 1:1 pixel mapping doesn't mean they're not HD.

The EICTA introduced "HD Ready 1080p" labelling in late 2007, which does guarantee the above.

Freddie59

JDxtra wrote: »

It also depends how far away you are from the TV. Sitting right in front of an LCD, you'll see how rubbish the compression can be (Sky or UPC - some channels worse than others). But sit back on the sofa and you might not spot any problems.

The bigger the TV, the more noticeable the compression will be (blockyness on complex pictures etc).

Precisely. The screen size/distance ratio is usually recommended at 3:1 (preferably 5:1) on SD. You can still see some degradation up close on HD - but it's miniscule in comparison.

This is a handy calculator:

http://www.dtvcity.com/lcdtv/lcdscreensize.html

watty

zilog_jones wrote: »

They're still capable of displaying HDTV in some form or another, unlike the large majority of CRT sets and SD LCD/plasma displays. Just because they can't show 1080i/p with 1:1 pixel mapping doesn't mean they're not HD.

The EICTA introduced "HD Ready 1080p" labelling in late 2007, which does guarantee the above.

Since you always need a set box ANYWAY, and downconverted HD is mathematically proven and actually better than SD from camera to TV, then you do get "HD" with ANY TV effectively.

OK I'm splitting hairs. But BBC HD on my SD 28" 4:3 CRT* is stunning. BBC HD on most 32" "HD Ready" 768 line LCDs does not actually look as good!

You really really see the improvement on HD on a 48" 1080 line set. On a 32" 768 line WS there is little difference between downsampled to 576 line via SCART in set box, upsampled to 768 in TV, and 1080 line resampled by TV to 768. On some TVs the SCART i/p is actually better (rubbish 1080 -> 768 resampling / deinterlacing?)

The HD logo is misleading.

Currys advertising tells you NOTHING except size of TV. Argos Advertising gives you brightness and native resolution, sometimes more.

Yet the Consumer Thingy only seems concerned about lack of display of pricing in the odd supermarket rather that systematic dis-information in MANY fields of selling (e.g. So called Mobile Broadband), Fuel saving SUVs etc..



(*It has true WS mode by reducing vertical scan)

zilog_jones

watty wrote: »

Since you always need a set box ANYWAY, and downconverted HD is mathematically proven and actually better than SD from camera to TV, then you do get "HD" with ANY TV effectively.

You're still watching 576i or 480i. And oversampling is nothing new, in a way - 35mm film is much higher definition than SDTV too. The fact it's not MPEG2 MP@ML with its crappy colour sampling and at a gammy bitrate is probably what's helping most.

OK I'm splitting hairs. But BBC HD on my SD 28" 4:3 CRT* is stunning. BBC HD on most 32" "HD Ready" 768 line LCDs does not actually look as good!

Maybe that's because LCDs are crap? Still can't beat CRTs for brightness and contrast - I still use a big old 19" Trinitron for my PC (was free too!). OLED stuff looks a lot more promising...

You really really see the improvement on HD on a 48" 1080 line set. On a 32" 768 line WS there is little difference between downsampled to 576 line via SCART in set box, upsampled to 768 in TV, and 1080 line resampled by TV to 768. On some TVs the SCART i/p is actually better (rubbish 1080 -> 768 resampling / deinterlacing?)

I've only played 1080p games and Blu-ray films on my 1366x768 TV so dunno about 1080i, but the difference in my experience is very noticeable, especially 3 metres or less away from the screen (where SD cable is a blurry, blocky mess).