New LCD TV has horrible non HD football picture

Hi,
I'm new to all this and new to this forum so please bear with me. Yesterday I bought my first LCD HD TV. Sony 40" KDL-40V2500 with 1080p (still learning all this). I do have a few questions and hopefully this forum can help as you come highly recommended by my sales guy. I'm using the component cables that comcast gave me yesterday when I picked up my hd box. It looks like a ribbon of 5 cables (3 video and 2 audio). I'm not using the hdmi cabling yet but plan to. With that said here are my questions:

1. HD channels show up incredibly well. But I noticed that when I viewed two different college football games on a non hd channel yesterday they were very blurry. Not just worse than hd but worse than any tv would show. I noticed that when you switch to a non hd channel it flashes up 480p for a moment. But all the component cables that feed the back of the tv go into video 4 which clearly says 1080i, 720p. The input next to it says 480i and
480p. When I switched the cables over to the 480 input the football was still really bad. So I went back to the 1080i, 720p input. The weird thing here is non hd channels that weren't showing football seemed quite ok. But football was horrible.

2. The comcast cable box in the back has dvi connection but no htmi. Should I buy a dvi to htmi cable and take advantage of that? I'm assuming if I do that I'll need to bring the audio up on another cable. Who knows this could solved the horrible non hd football issue above.

Anyway I'll probably have more questions but this is enough for now. I really appreciate your help. Also, any opinins of this Sony tv would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Don

You're probably noticing the poor deinterlacing present on much of SD cable channels. When you get to stuff like football, or racing - anything with lots of lines and such - it looks awful.

On your old TV you also had a lot less resolution - and likely a smaller size... Anytime you take an analogue cable signal and blow it up to a larger screen size you are going to see more "junk" in the picture.

In many markets, the quality of cable TV is so bad that only SD TV keeps people from freaking out and storming the offices in protest. Realize that as a percentage of the population, HD isn't yet dominant - until it is, the majority of people will tolerate this and cable companies will resist upgrading the signals.

denver_novice said:

The weird thing here is non hd channels that weren't showing football seemed quite ok. But football was horrible.

Click to expand...

You've deduced your own answer: The SD football channels are broadcasting crappy pictures.

Should I buy a dvi to htmi cable and take advantage of that? ..... Who knows this could solved the horrible non hd football issue above.

Click to expand...

No, a "bad channel" won't look better with DVI/HDMI.

So you're saying that when I want to watch non HD football I may as well go up to my bedroom or basement and watch it on an old fashioned tube set? I'm sinking into depression here. Now I'm wondering if all this is even worth it. Ok so the hdmi/dvi cable won't help this football issue but do you recommend it for hd or is the component cable I got from comcast good enough? I swear if this is the best you can see SD football I may box this thing up today. It isn't simply bad .... it is totally unacceptable. Comcast is coming out to look at it today. They say it shouldn't be that bad. Hopefully they can boost the signal or something.

Another question:
Would this be less of an issue on a plasma set? If so I'll return this and swap out. But based on what you're saying it won't matter.

What if I were watching that same crappy football game via dish vs cable? Would that solve it.

denver_novice said:

Another question:
Would this be less of an issue on a plasma set? If so I'll return this and swap out. But based on what you're saying it won't matter.

What if I were watching that same crappy football game via dish vs cable? Would that solve it.

Click to expand...

Considering the SD picture sucks on my RP Toshiba as well it probably won't make much difference on a plasma either.

Dish may be a different story as they may actually broadcast that channel in HD. (Are we talking Fox here? )

It may just be a placebo effect but setting my SA cable box to "pass thru" seems to help somewhat.

Ok now that some football is on here's what I'm finding. I found the clemson/sc game on sd and hd. SD is fairly ugly but not nearly as pathetic as the cbs broadcast I saw on SD yesterday. So perhaps the totally unacceptable picture I saw yesterday is a cbs issue. I'm going to try and live with this since I'm not a couch potato sports fanatic.

Can you explain what you mean with "setting my SA cable box to "pass thru" seems to help somewhat"?
Thanks.

denver_novice said:

So you're saying that when I want to watch non HD football I may as well go up to my bedroom or basement and watch it on an old fashioned tube set?

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Sadly, that's EXACTLY what you should do. As Clint said, if you watch SD on an HD TV it will look much crappier because the HD TV has the resolution to actually SHOW you how crappy the signal is.

Older TVs do NOT have the resolution to show you how truely crappy the signal actually is. It blurs things so much that you just never notice it. This is why SD programming should look better on older TVs. Of course it's not only the signal...most HD TVs do not implement de-interlacing properly anyway, so you get ugly artifacts all over the image.

But all is not lost! If you have a good upconverting DVD player, you should be able to see a much better picture on your TV than through your SD TV. Resolution won't be increased, but the picture should look better.

denver_novice said:

Can you explain what you mean with "setting my SA cable box to "pass thru" seems to help somewhat"?
Thanks.

Click to expand...

In saying this I was assuming you had a HD cable box. Perhaps a bad assumption.
Anyway, if you do indeed have a HD box:
My cable box is from Scientific Atlanta (SA), so we may be speaking in a different language considering you have Comcast. In the settings menu is a choice of display formats; HDMI, upconvert, fixed, and passthru. Pass thru tells the box to not upconvert the signal to a higher resolution format.
It's definitely a shot in the dark, and as I said may simply be my imagination, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

SD looks like crap on my HD RPTV to, but you get used to it. Besides, the channels you do get HD make up for it. That and DVD's

Here's the latest with my issue:
Comcast came to my home yesterday. The tech seemed quite knowledgable. He ran some test and made some calls to make sure we had the strongest digital signal we can get. Then we ran a cable directly to the tv and totally bypassed the comcast box. That didn't change the picture. Prior to all this he said he is finding the new 1080p tv's with 1,920 lines of resolution all have this issue because the tv is expecting better input. He said my tv is so good it shows sd crappy. Now I'm sitting here thinking ok I'll return my too good tv and downgrade to 720p. He admitted the hd boxes they give out suck so he said the hd boxes with dvr in them have a better tuner. So he plugs one in. The picture didn't improve but I quickly got sold on dvr for $5/month so he left it. I told him he should be in sales.

This morning I got up early and just watched SD. Nothing else. My wife, my daughter and me all agree SD tv is perfectly fine for viewing as long as it isn't a football game. So I don't think I'm going to go through the hassle of boxing this beast up, returning it and getting a lesser quality tv. Besides I'm not convinced lesser quality on the hd side means better quality on the sd side. The new box also has hdmi output where as the older box he took out only supported dvi. So now I can go hdmi to hdmi which the tv manual says you need to get the full 1080p.

Bottom line: sd tv is quite acceptable for anything but football. DVR's are awesome. This sony tv has an unreal hd picture even without using hdmi cabling. I just hope more and more stuff makes it to hd format but I have a feeling that will be a very slow process.

A general question. SD on my two year old 37" Sony plasma has always seemed pretty decent to me. It has never bothered me or made me think twice about PQ. This is going through a Motorola Comcast HD box. Could it be that a plasma handles SD better than LCD?

Nick

With HDTV "crap in = Crap out". There is way to much Compression going on with both Cable & Satellite signals. Flat panel HDTV technology is surpassing the current ability of the program providers to supply enough bandwith.

Hopefully customer demand will force the providers to provide solutions so we can take advantage of our TRUE HD display.

How does your HDTV look with OTA ? Most people marvel at OTA HD broadcast and can't understand why SD broadcast on cable & Sat. looks like crap When in over the last 10 - 15 years they allways got a better picture (PQ) with cable & Sat. on their standard CRT based analog TV than they did thru bunny ears. Funny how technology changes but peoples mindset takes longer to change.

Anyone have Fiber Optic cable ? can you report what you HDTV look like on ALL channels ?

A general question. SD on my two year old 37" Sony plasma has always seemed pretty decent to me. It has never bothered me or made me think twice about PQ. This is going through a Motorola Comcast HD box. Could it be that a plasma handles SD better than LCD?

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It's not necessarily the TV. You say you have the Motorola box. I set up several Comcast Motorola boxes every day at work and I have found that setting the 480i override to 480p significantly improves the picture on SD channels. Comcast doesn't seem to get this. Every single box I have seen installed by a Comcast technician did not have the override set to 480p. In fact, an alarming number weren't even outputing an HD signal, they were set to 480i.

Denver Novice, if you have the Motorola cable box, you should check to see that the 480i override is set to 480p. With the cable box off and the TV on, press the menu button on the Comcast remote. You should get a crude looking screen. The third one down should be "480i override". Make sure it says "480p".

100r1 said:

Anyone have Fiber Optic cable ? can you report what you HDTV look like on ALL channels ?

Click to expand...

I work for my local telephone/ISP/cable provider that has FTTH (fiber to the home) to about 3000 of our customers. We use Alcatel transport equipment and a Scientific Atlanta video head end. We have about 20 HDTV channels running up to 19 MHz bandwidth. Our HD signals look great depending on the source. On channels where the upconvert old SD programs to HD I can tell the quality is worse, but it is still better than the SD feed.

I've found the type of TV has alot to do with the look of the picture. I have a 57" Toshiba CRT RP-HDTV that looks incredible with both HD and SD channels (although the HD channels are multitudes better).

In our office lobby we have a 42" Sony plasma that looks great with HD but not as good with SD. We have three LCD flatscreens of different brands throughout the office building that are the same way. I was at a local customer's house last week that had just bought a new Hitachi 50" plasma and it looked awful with SD pictures too. The common denominator is they are all flatscreens. I think the upscaling of the 480i signal to the flatscreen's native 720 or 1080 resolution is at fault.

I have not seen the same SD problem with LCD and DLP rear projection HDTVs on our cable system. I even hooked up an Optima HD70 DLP projector to one of our SA 8300HD DVR boxes last week and it looked incredible with HD and still very good with SD signals.

Adjustments in the TV menu should be made. Have you lowered the sharpness control? The factory settings on tvs out of the box are terrible.

Check the Contrast control, usually set at 100 percent. If the contrast is set too high on a digital TV you lose information. Which wouldn't be as noticable on HD signals.

My advice would be to get a calibration disc such as DVE, Avia, or the ISF has a calibration disc that is easy to use.

Adjusting these settings can make a HUGE improvement over the factory settings. One thing to remember (garbage in = garbage out) standard definition broadcasts will never look as good as HD.

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http://www.imagingscience.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Video-Essentials-Entertainment-Component/dp/B00005PJ70/sr=8-1/qid=1164647101/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-5591963-2547958?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

http://www.amazon.com/AVIA-Guide-Home-Theater/dp/630551982X/sr=8-3/qid=1164647101/ref=pd_bbs_3/104-5591963-2547958?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

I hope this helps!

Low grade signals look ok on standard definition televisions, but look terrible on high resolution displays because every error in the signal is picked up by a more sensitive display. It is a similar principle to speakers. You plug 20 year old panasonic speakers into a stereo with crappy tape deck it sounds OK, you plug some Paradigm Studio 20's into the same get-up and you get terrible sound because the sensitive speaker system shows every mistake in the recording and the system.

Its not always the cable companies fault for sub part picture. If the cable company gets junk than thats all they can do is is send out junk. It has to be recorded in HD and also sent to the cable company in HD before they can even send it out in HD

buy equipment that scales well or wait for signal improvement

You really need to read the reviews on the new sets to know how well they will scale 480i signals. Some do much better than others. If you bought a set that is poor in this area, then you might get some improvement by getting a good avr that will scale your signal, like some Denon and Yamaha models.

I would not necessarily take the set back to get one of lower resolution. The newest Sony XBR 1080p LCD's look pretty good with a SD signal, although I did not view sports on them, just movies. The Sharp LCD's I looked at side by side looked poorer by comparison. Neither looked as good to me as a 720p Pioneer HD5071. I think that plasma still rules unless you have a very bright environment and can't eliminate the reflections.

Unfortunately we all have to wait a couple more years before HD programming will be the norm.

I think HiHo's response contains a good suggestion. I had a similar situation when I initially hooked up my Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector. Standard definition shows, especially football games, looked like crap. The crapiest characteristic was terrible de-interlacing -- anytime something moved across the screen it got all jagged around the edges.

I belive this terrible picture was due to a poor de-interlacer in my projector (poor by design, not specific to my unit). I was outputting a 480i signal from the cable box and the projector was doing a terrible job of de-interlacing it.

I went through the setup menus of my HD cable box (Pace brand from Time Warner). I found a setting to control the output formats. I set it to only output progressive formats (i.e. 480p and 720p). Now the cable box does the de-interlacing and the picture is much improved.

The SD picture quality is still blurry and the color is washed-out compared to HD. But the de-interlace jaggies are mostly gone. If jaggies are part of your problem then you definately should try this.

Good Luck
- Kevin