I've got a Panasonic RV31 player and a Panasonic 27" TV. The TV plays everything fine (such as satellite TV) but when I play some DVD's, there's a noticable contrast problem with the video. It's really bad on movies such as LOTR where there's plenty of dark scenes.

I've tried every setting on the DVD player and TV using both the S-Video and RCA outputs. When I asked the guy at the TV store about it, he said that some older TV's can't handle the resolution of some DVD players. The output of the RV31 into my capture card is perfect by the way.

So.. my questions are:
1. has anyone else seen this sort of thing before? Sort of tearing or smearing of hard edges during a high-contrast scenes.
2. are there other DVD players that work better with older TV's? My Panasonic 27" is about 10 years old but still works perfectly, so I don't want to buy a new TV.

I don't mind buying another DVD player. My problem is that I can't haul my TV down to the store to test the DVD players on it. Buying and returning a dozen different players probaly wouldn't make me popular either.