Will SD always look poor on LCD TVS?

HighlandeR

HighlandeR

HighlandeR

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Hi I just got my 1st LCD, a philips 26" LCD 26PF5321 bagged it while it was cheap, but soon as I hooked up my Cable digital box to it you cant help but notice its pixely/blocky and almost processed picture.

Obviously on the old 24" CRT it looked smooth more natural and no pixel/ghosty processing/blocky business.

With Transformers HD/ and HD material it looks crisp and sharp and non of the flaws.

Is this something you just get use to ?

Or are there LCDs that have much better SD quality/performance ?
 
Basically it's because the bitrate of the tv channels that your receiving is rubbish and your nice new tv is showing just how low quality they are. Some tv's handle SD better than others but none of them look particularly good in my opinion. You could get Sky HD :)
 
i have noticed that a lot of smaller lcd's are absolutely shocking with SD material. my neighbor's older 26" (i think) samsung was crap, frankly. his replacement, a newer samsung, is better, but still falls way short of my 40" sony which itself is supposed to be very poor with sd. ive not really found that to be the case.
 
HighlandeR said:
Hi I just got my 1st LCD, a philips 26" LCD 26PF5321 bagged it while it was cheap, but soon as I hooked up my Cable digital box to it you cant help but notice its pixely/blocky and almost processed picture.


Or are there LCDs that have much better SD quality/performance ?
Click to expand...

Thats because it IS a processed picture, the quality of the scalers vary hugely between different sets. The only option really is to go and demo a few different ones.
 
Sky SD Tv, some of the 'budget' channels like Hallmark for example are extremely low bitrate. At times its very obvious and the blockyness shows. However I have to admit even these channels look 'ok' most of the time.

The higher bitrate channels like BBC/ITV, Sky One etc look great.

However my TV is a 42inch Panasonic HD plasma (720p) and its scaler is fantastic, regardless of if its downscaling 1080 "TrueHD" or upscaling 576 Pal "SD" it always seems to get the maximum detail out of the source, without adding any noticable noise or blockyness.

Some people say that the lower native resolution of plasmas gives the scaler an easier job, but the latest generation of Panasonic plasmas (TH42PZ700) are 1920x1080 1080P sets and they look absolutely fantastic even if you only feed them a standard def image.. The scaler is everything it can either 'zoom' an already blocky low bitrate image, or it interpolate(sp?) additional data and make a guess at what it would be.. Think of it like AAx4 where a blocky line is softened by blending additional shades into the image. Whatever chip Panasonic use for scaling is awesome at its job.

I realise you said you are on cable, and I am refering to Sky... but a lot of LCD owners have reported that Sky TV is very poor quality and blocky... It really is the scalers in the TV which make the biggest difference. Its amazing that you would notice blockyness on a 26inch TV, when a 32inch 'Standard Def' CRT telly would most likely be deliverying a totally acceptable image.

I've seen one of the new 32inch "100hz processed" Panasonic LCD panels, and quite frankly was impressed. Pretty much the first LCD panel I could bear to look at for more than 30 seconds. Im guessing they use the same scalers as their plasma panels.
 
Yeah its just the feel of getting use to it, I dont have HD cable box or HD sky but I did try another free digital box and noticed quality was higher.

Im in 2 minds if I should keep it and put my almost £200 towards a better 26" SD performing LCD thats all.
 
A Panasonic 26LXD70 would give you a much better picture in SD. TBH though all plasmas/LCD's look slightly crap when fed with a poor source.
 
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