HDTV ugly sd and upconverted dvd makes me a relunctant buyer

[gll99]

What I have:
I have multiple sd digital cable boxes in my home but my largest tv's are 32" 480i and 480p crt. I also built a diy lcd projector and bought a cheap China made svga projector. Projectors have a 3-5 minute warm-up and about 10 minutes of cool down time and noisy fans certainly not whisper quiet unless you can put them in a separate projector room so they are not for everybody. They are great for movie night in a dark or near dark room but I wouldn't use it for regular tv watching it's just not a click-on and click-off device. Normal commercial models cost a bundle to operate because of the high lamp replacement cost.

What I want:
What is a guy to do if you want the big screen theatre effect for regular tv watching? You can't buy a large screen sd tv and even if one existed it wouldn't be cheaper than currently mass produced hdtv.

I've been looking for a hdtv or possibly 2 but still have nagging questions

The Problem:
Every store I've been in used a bluray display on their hdtv sets which always looks near perfect on every tv in the store. When there is snow or other artifacts it's usually blamed on signal splitting. When I ask to see an sd source they say they don't have one. Only one guy showed me a snowy antennae signal which didn't help because it was so poor I couldn't make anything out.

I finally got to see various signal sources on different models of lcd and plasma larger screen 47" to 52" hdtv at a Futureshop the other day.

The tv's were all 1080p 60Hz or 120hz 42" to 52".

The sd cable signal 480p source was ugly and had visible jaggies and wasn't sharp. It made the sets look like low res tv's.

The cable 720p (source) was better but barely acceptable not impressive.

The one that bothered me most was the upconverted dvd to a 1080p plasma. Based on comments I had heard about up-converting DVD players especially on a higher contrast plasma, I expected much better. The resulting image was shockingly disappointing. Low contrast, grayish image and not sharp at all. I forgot to ask what player they were using but I suspect it was a bluray player using a standard dvd. I certainly don't want to have to re-buy all my DVD's if they play so badly on an hdtv.

The pure bluray 1080p demo disc played flawlessly of course and that is usually what you see in the stores.

I wasn't planning on upgrading my cable to hd just yet. I'm on a grandfathered bundle with extra sd boxes thrown in free. I'm afraid if I add hd it will affect my specials put me on a new plan and cost a lot more than just the change to hd. Besides the best I'll get from cable hd is about 20-25 channels at 720p which didn't exactly look stunning in the store on a higher end, and cost, tv.

Those of you who have bluray and also up-convert dvd using a bluray or other upconverting player, is that your experience also or was it just maybe a bad video they were deliberately displaying to sell more bluray movies?

Is digital sd tv as bad as I saw on an hdtv? If it is, it will sure deflate my expectations and remove the urgency to buy into the hd market.

[Nelson37]

What you are trying to do is essentially put lipstick on a pig. A homely woman don't look so bad at 50 feet away, or after a few beers, but up close and/or sober, yuck.

Basically the larger screens move you closer to the image, magnifying any problems or errors.

Different TV's handle lower quality images in different ways, lots of variation here.

I am surprised you say that 720p did not look so good, many find this more appealing than 1080i.

Different brands, different models among brands, and event different revisions among models vary so much that without testing personally with an SD signal, I don't know what would be a good solution for you.

The only thing I can offer is that quality of broadcast image and HD availability is improving constantly, a good HD OTA antenna might give you some low-cost options. Having tried several, the TERK is excellent.

[fritzi93]

I'm under the impression that not everyone thinks upconverting makes a significant difference. A number of respected members here have stated that much depends on the scaling filters in a particular HD set. As to BR, many say that transfer quality is far from uniform, some are very good indeed, while others are rather poor.

Let me relate my (limited) experience:

Two months ago, I got a [blush] Vizio 42" 720p plasma. The price was right ($750), and I'm pleased with it. (Input is HDMI for DVD and HTPC.) My reasoning was:

1) The only HD content available to me are a half-dozen local unencrypted HD cable channels. I have no plans to upgrade the cable service.
2) I have a lot of DVDs and will not move to Blu-Ray any time soon.
3) At that size set, 1080p would be unnecessary, given the intended use.

What I see:

1) HD cable looks terrific. The Olympics were stunning and PBS shows like Nova and Nature are especially good.
2) SD cable is quite good, better perhaps than on my 32" 1080i CRT.
3) DVD, not so good, at either 480i or 480p input.

So I got a Philips upconverting DVD player. Output is set to 720p. Big *BIG* difference. 8) Perhaps the scaling filters aren't great in the Vizio, no surprise there. Somewhat surprisingly however, DVDs played from my HTPC over the same set (at 720p, DVI to HDMI) look very noticeably inferior to the same DVDs played over the Philips upconverter.

I don't know what to make of your dilemma. In my experience, SD should look better on an HDTV than on a SD set. Not a helluva lot, but enough better to notice. Maybe the SD source input was buggered somehow on the sets you saw? As to the disappointing upconverting you saw, I dunno.

I hope you get more answers soon. :P Good luck.

[oldandinthe way]

As I'm sure you know, many HDTVs upconvert SD images. (Generally a menu option)

There are also the upconverting DVD players.

When viewing in a store you are often unaware of where the images is being upconverted.

The preferred site of the upconversion differs with the specific equipment used.

Cable HD images also differ in quality on a particular TV based on whether component or HDMI inputs are used. Again the results are specific to the equipment combination used.

[jman98]

Look, SD can look great on an HDTV but it all is about connections, connections, connections. That's ALL that matters. Well, if your TV is crap, that matters too. If you use high quality connections for SD sources, to your HDTV, you can get great results.

High quality video connections are:
component
HDMI
DVI

High quality video connections are NOT:
S-video
composite
old style coax like used in the USA for cable TV.

I have a Samsung HDTV that can natively display 1080p. It's great. SD TV looks great on it. I have cable card and I get a great picture. Another key is that you should display things in their native resolution. Don't just stretch everything to 16:9. 4:3 sources should be viewed at 4:3. Stretching a 4:3 SD source to 16:9 just magnifies all the flaws in it. And it's also important how close you sit to the TV. If you sit 3 feet away, everything looks bad.

[jagabo]

[i]The sd cable signal 480p source was ugly and had visible jaggies and wasn't sharp. It made the sets look like low res tv's.

If you watched it on a 52 inch SD CRT it would look like low res TV too.

Based on comments I had heard about up-converting DVD players especially on a higher contrast plasma, I expected much better. The resulting image was shockingly disappointing. Low contrast, grayish image and not sharp at all.

"Low contrast, grayish image" is a sign of miscalibration (or a poor TV). Sharpness will vary depending on the quality of the upscale. Some people seem to like the new upscaling Toshibas:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic355600.html

[gll99]

Ok I avoided naming models to get away from the $ony is crap argument but the SD 480p signal was on a 550 and 750 series Samsung. Not exactly bad tv sets. The 720p was on a Sony priced above the other sets maybe a 70's series or higher but can't recall. I'm not buying that brand but that's what they had for comparison. From what I was told Sony are supposed to have a good filter system but the 720p cable signal was acceptable but no wow factor like when looking at a bluray source. The up-converted DVD source was showing on a Samsung 650 series plasma (50" or 52") set I can't recall the exact dimensions but it's one or the other. I also saw some stuff on a few Sharp tv's but I'd say it was about the same.

It was a quiet time in the store and the salesman spent a lot of time with my wife and I. He also said that no set in the store would make SD look better than what I saw. Usually they are so busy that unless they sense an immediate purchase they move on. This fella talked me out of buying a 47" 1080p Insignia (probably 2 sets) because of the high failure and return rate. The price was right at $1200 and I would have expected a little bit less features but not a high probability of failure right out of the store. I don't want a hassle.

I chose 1080p only because on any other res tv I see the pixels. Maybe not as bad as my 32' sets up close but even from a distance on the large sets with anything less than 1080p on many scenes I see the pixels. with a smaller set you can sit further away and you kind of forget about them but with a large tv at the same distance I would be reminded every time I watch tv. The 1080p pixels are so small they disappear at my normal viewing range.

On a previous visit to another store, I saw the difference between a (RGB) component connected source and an hdmi connected source. For the same material the hdmi/dvi is much sharper with truer colours. I would choose that every time if I could.

It is possible that some of the sets I saw were not connected on the hdmi and that's why the signal was not as good as it could have been. Over the next while I'll probably go back and revisit that. It could explain why the Sony 720p did not look as good as I expected it would. In most cases it's not too convenient if not impossible to ask people to look at the back of multiple large tv sets to see the connectors. Depending on the salesman some will tell you what you want to hear very few are like the one I met the other day at Future Shop.

[edDV]

Local cable company infrastructure varies widely by neighborhood. Here I've gone from a 1980's vintage antenna farm to fiber to last mile fed 1GHz. SD performance was night to day once the upgrade hassles ended.

Cable "digital" SD is distributed as ~524x480i MPeg2 at between 2-5 Mb/s. If you're switching your cable box to 480p, then deinterlace takes place in your cable box. Also analog NTSC will be deinterlaced. I think you will find most digital and all analog TV sets work better with 480i input.

Most current HDTV sets will play a movie DVD from a progressive DVD player well with or without upscale. If the TV is good, try 480i input and let the TV inverse telecine and upscale.

[edDV]

Are you seeing "pixels" or deinterlace artifacts? A poor noisy cable input will challenge any digital TV deinterlacer. Make sure the cable box is feeding 480i or you are just seeing cable box deinterlace performance, not the TV. HD source should look better. Look at 1080i action scenes to evaluate TV deinterlace.

If you are looking for a $1200 budget, I suggest you look at a Panasonic plasma in the 42-50" range. It won't be 1080p (probably 1366x768p) but these sets look very good with 480i and 1080i inputs. They have great black and contrast performance but are not as bright as an LCD. Samsung also makes a good plasma with 450 or 650 level image processor.

[jagabo]

I chose 1080p only because on any other res tv I see the pixels. Maybe not as bad as my 32' sets up close but even from a distance on the large sets with anything less than 1080p on many scenes I see the pixels. with a smaller set you can sit further away and you kind of forget about them but with a large tv at the same distance I would be reminded every time I watch tv. The 1080p pixels are so small they disappear at my normal viewing range.

I have a Samsung 46" 1080p LCD (LNT4665). To see the screen door of the LCD matrix I have to be sitting less than ~4 feet away. I find 5 to 6 feet to be optimal when watching 1080i/p sources. 480i sources I usually watch from 9 to 11 feet away.

On a previous visit to another store, I saw the difference between a (RGB) component connected source and an hdmi connected source. For the same material the hdmi/dvi is much sharper with truer colours. I would choose that every time if I could.

That probably had more to do with the settings than the cable type. Most HDTVs separate have settings for each input. So if the component was calibrated incorrectly the picture could look very different.

[orsetto]

Moving from a 32" CRT to a typical 42" LCD will make most people violently ill when they play their SD programming on it. There is no way around this: flat panel TVs all sort of skipped 20 years into the future and most are designed to assume a clean high-bit HDTV source will be fed to them at all times. This backfires horribly on those of us with "legacy" cable service and/or DVDs and (ugh) VHS. If you are extraordinarily lucky, your specific combination of player hardware, cable/satellite, flat panel TV, and room size will work in harmony to provide a reasonably viewable picture from SD sources. A number of people here at VH have such systems and speak well of them. But its comparatively uncommon: most people just learn to live with ugly fake-looking flat panel display of SD.

Work is progressing on affordable large-screen OLED displays, these seem to promise much better display of SD material. But OLED is still quite pricey so it may be some years off. Short term, the suggestion to try the Panasonic plasma sets is a good one: the average eye seems to react better to SD on plasma than on LCD. You can sometimes find excellent buys on the recently discontinued Pioneer plasma sets: these were great. The best available compromise between large screen size and SD performance were the late, lamented Sony rear-projection HDTV sets: these do not hang on the wall but they are very shallow and easily moved/mounted on TV tables. Some stores still have stock of these at nice closeout prices, not much more than $1000 depending on screen size. The replacement bulbs can be somewhat expensive, but I believe the Sonys come with at least one spare and they are not as pricey as the high-end front projection lamps. As an alternative, I think Mitsubishi and/or Samsung made similar rear-projection sets that use LED light sources (no bulbs to replace ever). You still sometimes see these at larger stores in bigger cities.

Unfortunately the North American consumer market is dominated by an attitude of "the bigger the better and it MUST hang on the wall and it MUST be LCD not plasma and definitely not rear projection". This has pretty much killed off every alternative except for the LCD flat panel, which perversely remains the worst possible display screen for the SD sources most of us must make do with for most programming. In the last month, nationally Time Warner Cable in the USA has seriously degraded the performance of many once-decent SD digital channels like TCM and Discovery, supposedly to make bandwidth room for more HDTV "on demand" content. Since you don't want to exchange your "grandfathered" SD boxes anytime soon, your options for display are kinda limited. You might try making a trip to the biggest city you can get to easily and look at whatever rear projection and plasma models you can find before settling for an LCD panel that you will hate. Otherwise, try to live with your current "noisy" projectors for the occasional movie night or big screen event for a few more years and wait for OLED technology to offer some improvements.

[vhelp]

While reviewing some sets, I found that they all consist of hardware NR and they seem to be in default state. The bad thing about that is how they quite easily show the "masky" look, especially on faces. I couldn't believe my eyes as I saw many sets lined up and showing this phenomina. It was like watching some of the demos I've seen posted here of over-filtered VHS conversions done by members on this forum. I realize that you really do have have to be at a certain distant when watching these next generation tv sets, but even at acceptable distance it can be annoying to distractive.

Regarding the NR aspects. I am theorizing that in addition to noise processing, that they also consist of algorithms for realtime de-pixelization of the images. That adds to the convincing aspects of the hardware NR artifacts I've seen so far.

I do have my eye on one of the Olivia's vs. Sony. I had the chance to look both together and I did appreciate teh Olivia better.

-vhelp 4847

[guns1inger]

The sad part is that even on a good TV, so called HD broadcasts are not uniform in quality. We have 5 OTA HD stations in our area. Three broadcast in 1080i, one in 720p, and one in 576p (yes, over here 576p is considered HDTV). All SD is 576i. Some of the 1080i material is no better that the 576i material, simply because the source was low to begin with. There is very little difference between the HDTV broadcast of the early seasons of the X files, and simply watching an upconverted DVD of the same episodes.

Even material that should have spent it's entire life in a HD stream, such as the recent Olympics telecast, is nothing to write home about. Most of the broadcast was horribly over compressed, artefact ridden, and looked like much of it had been processed by WinAVI before hitting our screens. I certainly feel sorry for anyone who bought a new set simply to watch the games in HD - it was not a good advert for the format.

That said, quality HD does look impressive, and even quality SD source, if well upscaled, will look far better than on an SD TV.

[jagabo]

Even material that should have spent it's entire life in a HD stream, such as the recent Olympics telecast, is nothing to write home about. Most of the broadcast was horribly over compressed, artefact ridden, and looked like much of it had been processed by WinAVI before hitting our screens.

It was even worse in the USA. All the feeds from China were 50i so they had to be frame rate converted to 60i. This added another layer of blurring and compression artifacts. Still, most of it was better than watching in SD.

[vhelp]

Still, I got away with recording most of them (evening hours through midnight) in hd while watching in analog SD or HD through my PC. I found that when I watched it on my PC, the frame rate jittered like maybe every second or so. It was bareable when watching on the PC (because I was recording them anyway) but the SD was obviously smoother (because it was interlaced) and also there was no pixelation because the analog cables don't have to manipulate for bitrate/traport nonsense. So, other than the minimal amount of pixel found in the source (because it originates as mpeg at the providers box) the fast motion scenes were clean for the most part. The HD, as others have already said was the worse .. so much pixelation in fast scenes. It was disapointing. But, its never gonna get better dispite what some mambers here want to believe, because of obvious reasons. So, they take advantage of the nonsense with transpoders and channel sharing, and you have bitrate starvation -- or, pixelation

On the possibility of archiving this source medium, it might actually be better to deinterlace some source if your situation calls for it, and depending on your tv sets good/bad features. By deinterlace, I mean either of the two, or ivtc. It all depends and of course you would test this out first for your given tv set.

-vhelp 4848

[edDV]

I think most of you are complaining about local delivery issues re: the Olympics. I found the "Birdcage" events quite good even though it had been frame rate converted for the USA. SD cable CNBC conversions suffered greatly but fortunately cable "Universal HD" was showing the same program in HD version with reasonably high quality.

It seems non-intuitive but SD source needs a higher quality HDTV (e.g. processing electronics) than HD source. Even then, you need to feed the set top box in 480i/576i before the TV can do its work. If you feed 480p or 720p, the cable box does the deinterlace work often with poor quality.

[fritzi93]

Re: The Olympics. The opening ceremonies and events such as swimming for example...yeah, I noticed artifacting. Much of the coverage was good, though. JMHO

[TBoneit]

My guess is that the TV sets the OP was looking at had never been adjusted for the source.

I find that the HD Locals off of cable through the TV tuner are fine and the 720p feed looks very good. I have adjusted each of the inputs settings to my liking. As was said here. Each of the input sources can be adjusted to match the source. It makes a difference. I find that SD looks OK. I feed most of my watching from a Satellite service DVR. I zoom the letterboxed SD that is 16:9 SD to fill the screen. Doing that I have lost resolution since I'm not using the whole 4:3 image but am cropping the black bars on the top and bottom off with the zoom. I find it very watchable at approx. 5 to 6 foot viewing distance on my 32" HDTV.

Bottom line there had to be something very wrong with the way those TV sets were setup or being fed with signal.




Overall I thought the Olympics looked good. I'll be burning the Closing ceremonies to DVD to run through the Philips 5992 and see how the HD cable feed into the DVD recorder looks. When I was editing out the commercials I thought it looked decent. However due to lack of enough HDMI inputs on the HDTV I was working through S-Video for the editing.

Can anybody suggest a reasonably priced source for a HDMI switcher that has a remote control for someone who has run out of HDMI ports.

[gshelley61]

Monoprice.com is a great place buy high quality, low cost HDMI switchers...

http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=109&cp_id=10110

[TBoneit]

Monoprice.com is a great place buy high quality, low cost HDMI switchers...

http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=109&cp_id=10110

Thanks!