Fixing your HDTV picture
Popular Mechanics magazine has written a useful article addressing some common picture problems with HDTVs and how to fix them - or at least to make the best of them or see if you can get your money back.
The issues they address:
- Clouds of digital "mosquitoes" surround fast-moving objects.
- Flesh tones and colors look unnatural.
- People and objects have weird white outlines around them.
- "Crawling moss" is seen in dark areas of a movie or TV show.
- HD programs break up into pixels and then go back to normal.
- HDTV looks good on my screen, but Standard-definition programs don't.
Fortunately, a lot of the tweaks are fairly simple, though you'll soon get to know your on-screen settings displays really well. Others apply to older and/or cheaper sets, and some are just because HD is still new, with some teething problems and differences in quality between broadcasters.
Of course, there are also solutions that can cost serious money, including investing in outboard video scalers and digital noise processors.
I only have two issues with my Sky HD picture:
1 - in low light & high zoom conditions the picture goes speckley (hardly Sky's fault - an optical limit of the cameras I assume.)
2 - On the HD Cricket coverage when there is a long shot showing most of the field of play and a large sector of the crowd then there is visible jerking/jumping in the crowd areas only. I am yet to work out whether this is on my end (TV or HD Box) or their end (pre-transmission processing.) I'd be interested if anyone else has the same artifacts. (p.s. I have a Sony Bravia from last christmas, connected to a Thomson Sky HD Box via HDMI)
Posted by: Diggory Laycock | July 7, 2006 1:51 AM