Picture Quality

Draupnir

Have UPC digital TV in my house, three boxes. Was over at a mates house and noticed that the quality of the picture on his UPC digital (non HD, standard the same as mine) is much better than it is on my TV. Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on why this would be and what I can do?

I am using a two month old Samsung 32" HD Ready TV while he has a Philips 32" HD ready that he bought about 2 years ago.

The only difference I can see is that he has a smaller black UPC box and I have a bigger grey one. Any ideas?

Alun

Do you have the box's output set to 'high quality', i.e. RGB? It defaults to composite video over the SCART connection. Also picture settings on the TV itself can have quite an effect.

Draupnir

I haven't messed around with any of the settings at all, noticed that our picture is quite fuzzy while the sharpness on the picture at my mates was phenomenal in comparison.

Will have to mess around with these settings, anything else I should look at in particular in the TV menu?

Alun

Well, to start with, setting the UPC box's output to RGB is a must, really. Unless you've done that, there's not much point messing with anything on the TV itself.

My Philips set has a huge raft of bells and whistles effects that supposedly improve picture quality, but these seem to be more suitable for lower quality analogue TV signals than higher quality RGB signals from digital sources, so I've just either turned them off completely or set them at their lowest setting. My set remembers a different set of settings for every input, so setting optimal settings for the UPC box on one RGB SCART doesn't affect other sources.

I can't really say what settings might be possible candidates for tweaking on your Samsung set, but as I said, first off make sure you're feeding the TV an RGB signal first.

Often there's a sharpness setting, there is on mine, and tweaking that my help a little, but beware of setting it too high as you'll get some nasty artefacts, esp. on edges if you do.

Ranicand

Draupnir wrote: »

I haven't messed around with any of the settings at all, noticed that our picture is quite fuzzy while the sharpness on the picture at my mates was phenomenal in comparison.

Will have to mess around with these settings, anything else I should look at in particular in the TV menu?

Do you have you boxes set to widescreen? or have you a 4.3 picture in stretch-vision with everyone looking fat?

Also you should have your boxed set to RGB high.

Draupnir

I appreciate all the advice lads, will log in at home tonight and fiddle with the settings you mentioned and hopefully see an improvement.

belmulletman

Also...
Usually with TV's (depending on the amount of scart sockets the TV has) not all Scarts are RGB enabled.
Check the TV manual to make sure that you are in the RGB enabled socket. There's no point in turnin on the RGB Setting if the scart your plugged into can't handle it (i.e. you won't see any difference)
And, make sure you're scart cable has all the pins. the cheaper cables (sometimes the ones that come with the equipment) are missing alot of pins needed for the higher quality picture.
There's no need to spend alot of money on a cable, it just needs all the pins is all.

I have to say, I've always though the pic quality from UPC is pretty good.

Alun

belmulletman wrote: »

Also...
Usually with TV's (depending on the amount of scart sockets the TV has) not all Scarts are RGB enabled. Check the TV manual to make sure that you are in the RGB enabled socket.

Good point.