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Why does HDMI look rubbish compared to VGA

WatchTower

WatchTower

WatchTower

Soldato
Joined
9 Jan 2005
Posts
4,427
Location
Stoke-On-Trent
i have 40" 6 serise Samsung TV which I bought about 20 months ago. Even though you would think HDMI would be the best way to display HD content I find it's complete garbage compard to VGA. I find VGA to be far more Pixal pefect than HDMI. Things I've tried with HDMI are 360, PS3 consoles and 8800GT, ATI's Mobilty 4570 graphics cards. VGA beats HDMI on all these products apart from I can't use VGA on my PS3 but still I can tell it's not perfect.

IS HDMI just crap or is there something I could be doing wrong?
 
Overscan is usually the culprit with hdmi is manufacturers tend to enable it by default. It blows the picture up by around 5%, chops the edges off and makes it look blurry. Is there an option to turn it off somewhere? It makes a massive difference on my set.
 
I had this problem when I connected it to my Dads Samsung TV too HGMI utter poo, VGA great.......

I was only testing something, so didnt have time to go through the TV options to try and find a solution :(

Diddy
 
Yea I get this too. Games and hdmi films look great but extended desktop text is almost unreadable ;(
 
Dodgy cable? Make sure you have a HDMI 1.4 cable too as they make a difference.
 
Same problem here on a Samsung LCD. However on my Panasonic plasma HDMI looks perfect. Is it a problem only Samsung tvs have?
 
My mate has a Samsung, think he said something like "just scan" in the TV's menu to stop it scaling a PC input.
 
You need to ensure 1:1 pixel mapping is enabled on your TV otherwise HDMI always looks poor due to scaling issues. 1:1 is the only way to setup a HDMI to PC cable. It will most likely be as a menu option on your TV somewhere.
 
either your tv is a load of balls or you've got it set up wrong. There's no reason why VGA should ever look better than HDMI really
 
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I have a sammy 6 series, and it too looked rubbish in 1080 only. 720p looked crystal (obviously running 1:1 mapping in both to stop overscan). I later figured that that the res it was actually running was 1080i, and I hat to manually add 1080p. Once set it looked crystal clear. (it took me 3 months to realise.. doh!)
 
A lot of TVs have extra processing on non-VGA inputs, dynamic contrast and crap like that... and you might need to set 1:1 pixel mapping manually on HDMI.
 
I think I need to test this, I've always been disappointed with the xbox on my samsung.
This is all sounding very familiar.

When using a VGA cable on xbox 360, where does the sound input/output come into play?
 
Would need a seperate cable.

I'm having a similar problem myself with HDMI/VGA on a 4 series Samsung TV which I will be making a new thread about once I done some more testing.
 
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