TV shows on LCD look ugly...

Xeno

Yeah, got my brother a LCD tv. This one to be exact.

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&sku_id=0665000FS10086210&catid=#

An well, we are kinda disappointed with the picture. Don't get me wrong, video games look fantastic. Much better than our tube tv. But, watching normal tv doesn't look that great. We have this SONY tube tv, and the channels look superb on it. Everything is so crisp and fluid. But the lcd looks odd. Everything is kinda blurry. Nothing is really sharp. The colours are kinda mehh.

Anyone know what is up? I hope you guys know what I'm talking about. We've fucked around with the options but it's still not perfect. Is it not possible to atleast replicate the picture that we get from the CRT?

We've gone to Futureshop to look at the displays and they have the same problem that we do. We assumed because they didn't properly configure it, but now we're guessing its a problem with the the technology.

Mmmm... Cocks...

Yea pretty much any standard definition TV channel is going to look like crap.
It only looks fine on your old tube because all those defects are hidden in the low res.

Try watching some HD channels.

Fibretip

these threads are becoming the new girl threads huh?

i have to say... i'm impressed at how good normal channels look on my new lcd. Not because they look good.. but because i thought they'd look awful i mean, normal tv is what, 320 res? for that to be stretched all that way is pretty good.

I really think the companies selling tv's are pulling some monumental bullshit here though... nobody seems to be aware that standard tv shows will look ass on them. the store i got mine from had a sign that was like 4 inches across at the bottom of the shelving unit that said "display models are displaying a HD signal" and that was it. at no point did anyone say anything about it.

DrFrylock

I'm still quite skeptical of the manufacturers here. TV-resolution CRTs and LCDs are different technologies, yes. However, I really can't imagine why large LCDs look so much worse than a plain Sony 27" Trinitron on a standard-definition signal. I think it's shoddy engineering, and better techniques could alleviate some of this.

For example, as I understand it, CRTs have two interesting phenomena: color bleed and phosphor fading. That is, the edges of each pixel aren't quite discrete, so a little of each pixel blends with the pixels next to it, creating a smoother (if "blurrier") image, but at 30 frames/60 fields, it's not so bad. Second, the phosphors on the screen don't switch on and off instantaneously, they fade a little bit. This was a problem with some early Atari 2600 emulators. The Atari 2600 programmers, working with nearly no hardware capacity, would sometimes draw a sprite on every other scanline on successive frames, relying on this phenomenon to make it appear as though, although the sprite would flicker a bit, all scanlines were filled in. But these games looked like ass on emulators that didn't reproduce the effect, since newer displays could turn on and off those pixels at the appropriate frequencies. Later emulators actually attempted to simulate this effect with some effort.

Lastly, who knows what algorithms these jokers are using for upscaling. Maybe it's just pure interpolation or nearest-neighbor. I know for a fact that early laptops upscaled like shit, but my new one can display a 1024x768 screen quite well on a 1400xsomething native LCD, with just a bit of softness on the edges.

Although all of the above is pure speculation (I don't know what tricks manufacturers do and don't rely on to display SDTV signals), I'm fairly certain they're not doing all they can to make those signals look good on modern displays. Also, there's good reason to believe that different manufacturers may use different strategies (or combinations thereof) to deal with the problem, and therefore one TV may look substantially better or worse than another.

robotbebop

I have a 19" LCD HDTV and standard TV looks fine, but it's hard to tell simply because my cable connection down here is pretty bad.

Are you using a regular TV cable or are you using composite out of a digital receiver?

Xeno

The tv is hooked up straight to the cable. No receivers or anything like that.

robotbebop

Xeno wrote: »

The tv is hooked up straight to the cable. No receivers or anything like that.

If you have digital cable it MIGHT look a bit better coming in over a composite connection, but other than that, well.. you're stuck with it.

Xeno

Yeah, that is really unfortunate. I have not had the chance to watch any HD tv shows yet because frankly, most of what we watch is SD.

Atleast my family learned an expensive lesson. We are going to hold off on buying any sort of HD tv. Really, most of what we watch is normal tv programming and frankly, we couldn't care less if 5% of the time we watch dvds and it looking good versus watching 95% of the time tv and being disappointed.

Unless is there some way to downgrade the tv so that it mimics a CRT? I mean, do I have any options here besides returning it?

kevbot

Have you checked for a sharpness setting in the menus? My Aquos looked terrible until I turned the Sharpness (heh) up beyond its default (0). A TV that small should look fine with a standard def signal.

robotbebop

Keep in mind that not all HDTV's display SD content poorly. And you really CANNOT find a TV that ISN'T HDTV anymore, unless you want a huge-ass hulking CRT TV. It's just a matter of doing your research and hoping that the salesman isn't just telling you whatever he can to make the sale.

Also, what you think of as "crap" may be perfectly fine for the rest of us, maybe you (and other family members?) are just too picky.