Picture quality of Samsung LN-R408D.

[suppafreak]

I just purchased the Samsung LN-R408D 40" LCD TV.

http://www.samsung.com/Products/TV/LCDTV/LNR408DXXAA.asp

Eventually (in about a week) I will connect it using the HDMI cable to Direct TV HD receiver. For now I only connected the DVD using the component cables and PS2 and Direct TV receiver using the S-VIDEO.

I have the picture quality question.

The picture quality of the DVD is great, however, the picture quality of Direct TV using the coaxial cable is horrible, switching the to S-VIDEO improves the quality, but still not as good as I hope it would be.

Does anyone knows what would be, or how to calibrate the TV to the optimal level?

Also, since most of the channels still non-HD, I watch them in 4:3 ratio. That picture obviously has black bars on the sides. Will the 4:3 picture leave a burned mark if watch for long period of time? What about the TV station logos, will they eventually burn in?

Does HDMI cable improve the picture quality of non-HD channels?

[SatStorm]

I can't answer you straight, 'cause I'm in Europe and here we don't have Direct TV, we have our own services.

Most DVB /s channels look horrible because they choose to transmit with the less possible bitrate that is needed to support the picture framesize they have. And that picture framesizes, rarelly is full or cropped CCIR. Usually, it is 544 x 576 or 528 x 576 (there in USA, from what I know, Direct TV use 528 x 480 for many channels).
The bottom line is that DVB Satellite channels in theory can be better DVD Video movies (DVB standard support 15.000kb/s, much more DVD Video discs). In practice they use 528 x 576/480 with an average of 3000kb/s, far very low to support picture quality.
It is not the technology to blame, just the companies that provide that crappy quality and the costumers that support that picture quality crap product.

Regarding your second question, since your TV is LCD (not Plasma!), you won't have problems like burned marks, burn in, etc. Those are Plasma technology problems, not LCD ones!

Finally, HDMI improve the picture quality on the good DVB channels. For the rest, HDMI shows all the problems of the bad compressed picture much more! Of course, I'm PAL and I don't know about NTSC. Not that PAL / NTSC counts on the digital world, but you never know

[malisamson]

Check this site out, it will really boost the performance of your TV, can't wait to get my Pioneer PDP-50XDE and watch it at the best performance ^^

http://www.cnet.com/4520-7874_1-5102926-1.html