Picture quality help

[Jay]

First off I will admit I am really not up with the latest in home theater, I do know how they (LCD's, Plasma's etc) work but I don't know much about 1080i vs 1080p etc.

Anyway

Recently my family inherited two barley used plasma TV's, today I decided to connect one up briefly to check it out

It is a LG 50" (127cm) Plasma model DT-50PY10, this
http://www.cnet.com.au/tvs/plasma/0,39035288,40003740,00.htm


I connected my PS2 with GT4 running upto it via the standard AV cables and frankly the picture quality is garbage, even viewing at 15feet away, much worse than on my 80cm CRT Trinitron, I fiddled with settings and couldn't improve it at all.

I decided to hook up my antenna to the TV, the TV has a integrated HD tuner so I set it on free HDTV channels and the same problem, garbage screen quality.

The picture on both the PS2 and HD TV signal were sort of blurry and plenty of static looking fuzziness (especially notable when the screen goes black). I changed modes to some input I didn't have connected and the black screen lost all the fuzziness and when the menu bar came up it was sharp and clear (both the text and box).

To me it seems my signals to the Plasma is bad but I use the same signals to my 80cm Trinitron and they look much clearer.

Any techies have ideas how to fix this? Will changing cables from the PS2 to plasma suddenly give me a clear screen? and how come my HDTV signal looks worse on my Plasma than the ordinary TV signal looks on my CRT using the same antenna?

Many thanks in advance.

 

[wfooshee]

I think you are seeing an artifact of the set digitizing and upscaling a standard picture into its own HD resolution.

If you're using standard AV cables, you're not even approaching HD from the PS2, and the set is probably digitizing the analog signal and upscaling. My father-in-law has a really really nice Sony HD CRT set that does this, and HD pictures are incredible. Standard TV absolutely sucks, though. It's pixellated and jaggied all to hell and back. Apparently the set wants to display in 720p or 1080i, no matter what the input is, and lesser inputs have to be digitized and upscaled. Maybe this is what's happening to you, although it doesn't explain the HD antenna reception. That is, unless you're actually tuning standard TV, not HD.

Also, GT4 has 1080i HD, but only in North America. The PAL versions do not support HD output. The best you'll get is with an S-video cable set, or if the PAL game will do progressive scan, you can use the component cable set.

This digitizing artifact I believe you are seeing is only enhanced by the size of the screen.

As an aside, I personally don't think LG makes the best plasma sets.

 

[Danoff]

First off I will admit I am really not up with the latest in home theater, I do know how they (LCD's, Plasma's etc) work but I don't know much about 1080i vs 1080p etc.

Anyway

Recently my family inherited two barley used plasma TV's, today I decided to connect one up briefly to check it out

It is a LG 50" (127cm) Plasma model DT-50PY10, this
http://www.cnet.com.au/tvs/plasma/0,39035288,40003740,00.htm


I connected my PS2 with GT4 running upto it via the standard AV cables and frankly the picture quality is garbage, even viewing at 15feet away, much worse than on my 80cm CRT Trinitron, I fiddled with settings and couldn't improve it at all.

I decided to hook up my antenna to the TV, the TV has a integrated HD tuner so I set it on free HDTV channels and the same problem, garbage screen quality.

The picture on both the PS2 and HD TV signal were sort of blurry and plenty of static looking fuzziness (especially notable when the screen goes black). I changed modes to some input I didn't have connected and the black screen lost all the fuzziness and when the menu bar came up it was sharp and clear (both the text and box).

To me it seems my signals to the Plasma is bad but I use the same signals to my 80cm Trinitron and they look much clearer.

Any techies have ideas how to fix this? Will changing cables from the PS2 to plasma suddenly give me a clear screen? and how come my HDTV signal looks worse on my Plasma than the ordinary TV signal looks on my CRT using the same antenna?

Many thanks in advance.

Grab your DVD player and hook it up to the TV using component cables.

 

[Jay]

Ok I had another play with it today (not properly setup yet just sitting and waiting for when I have more time to make room for it) and strangely the HDTV looks much better today, actually it looks great. I'm not sure if I was way too picky about the picture last time or if my fiddling around helped. I know I didn't have it tuned to standard TV as I switched it to standard analogue TV today and its even worse than I was complaining about in the first post.


I did hook up a DVD player to it today and played a DVD, I was not real impressed, although it was hooked up through an AV input. I just found a component cable (thats the red, green, blue one right?) and I will try the DVD player out again tomorrow.

Well I am now happy with the HDTV picture, I will see how the DVD picture goes after I hook it up with component cables tomorrow. I might also try out the other TV tomorrow, a 42" Plasma.

Thanks for the guys

 

[Danoff]

Ok I had another play with it today (not properly setup yet just sitting and waiting for when I have more time to make room for it) and strangely the HDTV looks much better today, actually it looks great. I'm not sure if I was way too picky about the picture last time or if my fiddling around helped. I know I didn't have it tuned to standard TV as I switched it to standard analogue TV today and its even worse than I was complaining about in the first post.


I did hook up a DVD player to it today and played a DVD, I was not real impressed, although it was hooked up through an AV input. I just found a component cable (thats the red, green, blue one right?) and I will try the DVD player out again tomorrow.

Well I am now happy with the HDTV picture, I will see how the DVD picture goes after I hook it up with component cables tomorrow. I might also try out the other TV tomorrow, a 42" Plasma.

Thanks for the guys

Nothing that you hook up using composite (Red Yellow and White) cables is going to look good. I've done that before and it sucks. Do not use anything except component (RGB) or DVI for signals that you actually care about the quality of (with another possible exception being VGA).

 

[Jay]

Ok today I hooked up the DVD player with the RGB component cable, it did sharpen the picture up considerably, looks great now 👍

Didn't bother trying out the 42" Plasma yet, I will probably set both of them up properly on the weekend.