I've recently managed to win a Sharp Aquos LC26GA5E TV but am finding it very difficult to get a picture quality anywhere near equal to the old CRT it replaced (and that TV was almost the same size). The problem occurs with all my inputs (Terrestrial, Sky and DVD player, the latter two via SCART). Essentially, the picture is fine for close up detail like people's faces, but backgrounds are so blurred that they aren't determinable (e.g. bookshelves in the background) and some motion blur occurs when things move quickly. When the 'sharpness' of the picture is reduced, everything becomes a bit blurred, but when it is increased, fuzzy dots start to appear around everything... Another issue is that the picture appears exactly like when you use the "strong edges" filter in an image processing program. Everything is very vivid such that edges seem smoothed out. Any ideas how to improve the picture? Oh I feel i should add, this is my first LCD TV, and the TV is HD compatible, but I'm not using HD at present. Is this a likely cause of a problem?
I think a lot of people who buy a LCD or plasma get the same thing and are worried that the tv is no good. I felt the same way about mine. These screens are so much sharper than CRTs that they show you the true quality of your video inputs. So what you thought was a good picture quality before was your old tv blurring out the fuzzy signal. LCDs show you what the signal is really like which is a bit off putting at first. To get the best picture you need to now use high quality inputs. There is not much you can do about the tv until Sky and BBC start broadcasting in HD. For DVD you should use component cables (I got a new dvd player as my old one didn't have the outputs) It now runs at 576p Also, my xbox using RGB scart looked great on the old 28" CRT but rubbish on my 27" LCD. Got the HD AV cable and it was £25 well spent as it now runs in 480p. so yeah, it's that you have a good tv and it's not getting the type of high quality video it needs to work properly. Just think that 480p and 576p are not even really that good. the xbox 360 can do 720p and the PS3 will do 1080p (if your tv can handle it) so things will only get better.
Well, our TV only does 768p, you can only win so much!!! But yeah, I wonder if we can get a Component DVD player, probably at a similar time to getting sky HD. (I know we won't be able to record HD broadcasts, well that's assuming we don't end up getting an HD DVD player (I doubt it since our TV isn't HD ready and needs an circumvention box due to not having HDMI). Yeah, thanks for that, you kind of reiterate what I suspected, but I wasn't sure. Cool, now I can relax, to some extent... Before we consider Exams and university!
just one thing, you don't really need HDMI to get high def. As far as I understand, component cables carry the same signal or at least to a similar standard. i think HDMI is just going to be the new standard of connector as it's a nice tidy small plug and not 3 seperate cables. My LCD has got no HDMI input but it supports up to 1080i (no 1080p though but i can't be fussy) the component input is giving me the 576p from my dvd player, which is only a £40 philips, and also the component input is supposed to be HDMI compatible, so in the future if i do get a PS3 i should be able to get a cable that connects the PS3 HDMI ouput to my component inputs on the TV, it will give me the same picture quality but just a bit more cable messyness! PS, I have 2 scarts on my tv, only one supports RGB (you should check if yours is the same (or perhaps both support RGB as it's a better tv than mine, better manufacturer anyway) Anyway, i have jsut moved my digital box from scart 2 to scart 1 which is the RGB scart, and the picture is a hell of a lot better now. it didn't seem to make that much difference for the xbox but a big improvement for tv.
...and the motion blur is probably partly due tp the quality of video signal but will also be due to the response time on your LCD. check to see how fast it is, eg, 25ms, 16ms etc, the smaller the better. watching the football on mine when the camera follows the ball, the ball is essentially staying still on the screen so looks fine, but the grass in the background sometimes rushes past a bit too fast for the pixels on the screen to cope with. mine has a 25ms response time which against some of the expensive models is a bit on the slow side but it is fine for most uses apart from very fast moving images like watching sports, and even then it is only the fast movinf background that suffers from a bit of 'ghosting'. it's no problem though, it's all just stuff a CRT tv would blur out anyway.
I know you can get HD with component but the 'HD ready' ruling is you need an HDMI connector so that the screen can digitally identify itself against the copy protection software on the disc. Any TV that doesn't have an HDMI port will need a copy protection removal box to play back HD films. Note that this sounds a little underhand and below the law. I was under the impression the TV was 16ms, maybe 20, but I do still see ghosting, or what I think is ghosting. I recall there only being an 'RGB' input option for one of the AVs that goes to SCART but thought it was on the skybox (the correct one). However, I seem to also recall selecting it and seeing a blank picture, despite selecting the output mode as RGB on the sky services menu. I'll have another look later. RGB is definitely the better option, I'm sure. I'm going to order a component output for my PS2 later and load GT4 in 1080i (or 540 as I understand it for a 26") and see how much better it looks.
