3 replies to this topic

[Crash_test]

If you are like me 90% of the time you spend using your HD TV is spent watching regular television broadcasts and most of that time is spent watching SD broadcasts?

I own (have owned) six HD televisions in the last four and a half years and all have been 720p displays except for my last purchase which was a 46" Samsung 1080p LCD (LA46A550) which I bought two years ago - it is a very average TV imo as feeding it anything less than a 1080p signal will look VERY ordinary, even your best Blu-ray would struggle to impress on this TV. Another thing that annoys me besides its poor SD performance is that my older 50" 720p LG plasma does as good a job with HD as well as a MUCH better job of SD than does the 1080p Sammy, now If I was using my Sammy for watching Blu-ray films 24/7 I might think it was a good TV but as I use it for general television viewing... I'm afraid it's a bit of a dog

Now I'm no tech geek but I know enough to realise that a 1080 display has more work to do when scaling a 576i signal so it isn't too surprising to me that a lower res display with fewer pixels will probably do a better job with the limited information it has to work with but...?!
My 46" does a woeful job with SD TV: washed out colours; artifacts everywhere; blurred images, it's actually painful to watch. To be honest though I haven't seen many 1080p panels that can manage a decent image with 567i signal but I bet most would do a significantly better job than my sad Sammy.

I guess in a perfect world all the broadcasters would have all the bandwidth they needed to deliver 1080i across all their channels (and the sense to actually use it for HD programmes... but that's another story - do we NEED to have our ABC news broadcast in HD, wouldn't SD be sufficient and the bandwidth better spent on material that would benefit from 720p like documentaries and movies? *rolls eyes*). Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world and so the majority of programmes I find myself watching are SD which look horrible spread out over 1080 lines of vertical resolution on a TV that only just manages to deliver an acceptable HD image.

Anyway that's my little rant/whinge out of the way *more eye rolling* apologies to everyone who bothered reading it

The actual reason for this post is to ask for some advice:
I intend on buying a new TV for my bedroom to replace the 46" Sammy but want to replace it with either a 1080p TV that CAN deliver a decent SD picture or a 720p TV that from experience will deliver a decent SD picture. The problem I've found is that it is almost impossible these days to find a 768res television that isn't a 50" plasma and I don't really want to go any bigger than 46" if possible.
If anyone can point me in the direction of a 42" - 47" 768res television or a 1080p TV (that won't cost me a kidney) that is known to manage a good SD picture I would be very grateful.

Thanks


PS: If anyone in Adelaide wants a cheap, slightly used 46" Samsung LCD please message me  

[pgdownload]

Hi Crash Test,

See my post here

Regards

Peter Gillespie

[jsmith]

Crash_test, on Dec 11 2010, 04:18 PM, said:

If you are like me 90% of the time you spend using your HD TV is spent watching regular television broadcasts and most of that time is spent watching SD broadcasts?

The newer Sammys, Sonys, Pannas etc. mostly pass de-interlacing tests well and perform basic upscaling reasonably well now too. I think you'd see an improvement compared to your current set. Not just for the mentioned reasons but also improved panel types and much better contrast levels. LED edgelit models can be inferior in some respects to similar CCFL models, however a proper LED backlit panel that locally dims the LED's will perform best.

If you want to then get serious about improving SD PQ then you may want to invest in an AVR or external scaler which will do alot more to remove artifacts and noise before the TV even gets the signal. For FTA TV you'd of course have to get an external HD STB or HTPC with a HD tuner card to send the DTV signal to the scaler unaltered... A HTPC with a HQ video card will do a good job also.

JSmith

[stefcep]

Crash_test, on Dec 11 2010, 04:18 PM, said:

If anyone can point me in the direction of a 42" - 47" 768res television or a 1080p TV (that won't cost me a kidney) that is known to manage a good SD picture I would be very grateful.

Is it critical to be 3 inches smaller?  A friend just bought a 50 inch Pana 1024x768 plasma:SD TV looks great, as does 720p XBOX, and DVD's played via HDMI on the XBOX look brilliant.