LCD/Plasma/CRT/DLP - questions

[SubparMario]

Ta. Man, the 360 looks fantastic like this.

1280x720 in 16:9 on this NEC-Mitsubishi CRT is pin-sharp. More so than any HDTV I've seen.

[andrewfee]

D65 is reference, so set your monitor to 6500k, it will not be perfect unless you calibrate it professionaly, but will be close enough for a console.

With most monitors I've tested, the "6500k" setting is actually closer to 5000k - there's always been far too much red. That could just be due to the age of the display though I guess.

Better than 9300k though!

EDIT: And as for sharpness - you can't beat an LCD 1:1 mapped - it's just that most LCDs out there won't 1:1 map 1280x720 now. (this one does though. )

[Aionic]

Hey

I posted awhile back in this thread. At the time, I was waiting to get my money back from my faulty old Sony CRT, something that should finally be sorted out in the next week.

After thinking about it for awhile, I've decided to buy the Sony KDL-32S2010U from JL for ?995.

Before I place my order with John Lewis, can anyone tell me how good it handles SD?
I'm a big gamer, and have lots of PS1/PS2 and GC games (I have 5 PS2 games on pre-order that come out next month...), so it's important to me that any LCD I buy is able to do a good job when I'm using my consoles.

Also, would using component cables give better picture quality, even on games that don't support PS?

[Kotatsu Neko]

Yes, use component or you will be apalled at the horrible interlace artefacts. Remember though that most PS2 games do not support progressive scan.

As for SD content, it's going to look pretty naff on a high-res LCD. Blocky and blurry, it's not pretty. Xbox stuff looks by far the best out of the previous gen consoles as some games ran with full anti-aliasing, and that really goes a good way to smooth out the jaggies. PS2 will be by a long way the worst obviously.

Why are you going for a Sony TV by the way? Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe they're only 720p? I just bought a nice Toshiba LCD which goes all the way up to 1920x1080, which is great for HD broadcasts (which are all 1080i) and of course for HD-DVD. (1080p)

[djjimbob]

Why are you going for a Sony TV by the way? Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe they're only 720p? I just bought a nice Toshiba LCD which goes all the way up to 1920x1080, which is great for HD broadcasts (which are all 1080i) and of course for HD-DVD. (1080p)

and how much was your Tosh?

[Aionic]

Why Sony? Simply because it has received mostly excellent reviews. It is only 720P, you're right, but I've been told that you can't see any difference between 720P and 1080P unless your TV is at least 40".

If you can point me in the direction of a HDTV that can handle SD content better than Sony, go for it. I've never even owned a TV that can handle 480P before, so this is a big step into the unknown for me.

[Kotatsu Neko]

and how much was your Tosh?

?1350. 42".

[Kotatsu Neko]

Why Sony? Simply because it has received mostly excellent reviews. It is only 720P, you're right, but I've been told that you can't see any difference between 720P and 1080P unless your TV is at least 40".

If you can point me in the direction of a HDTV that can handle SD content better than Sony, go for it. I've never even owned a TV that can handle 480P before, so this is a big step into the unknown for me.

They'll all look much the same when upscaling 480p or 480i... and that's pretty horrible I'm afraid. But when you compare that to watching SD digital TV it will look great by comparison! Some digi TV channels (I have cable and Freeview, and both look the same) are a completely unwatchable mess of blocks and mush. You'll soon realise that HD-TVs are made for HD content, and become reluctant to watch anything but HD TV channels and Xbox 360 whenever possible. But on the plus side that mean browsing the on screen TV guide much eaiser when you only have a handful of channels to look at!

That said, really high quality DVDs do upscale quite nicely. I use my Xbox Media Center to upscale them to 1080i and I've been impressed by top tier discs such as The Incredibles. (and also apalled by discs I previously thought were good, such as the R2 JP Studio Ghibli discs)

[Aionic]

So it even looks ****ty when using 480P? I was hoping 480P would remove some of the PS2 jaggies. =(

Can this Sony HDTV really be that bad at displaying SD stuff? I'd be happy with anything that is better than my terrible 32" Sanyo CRT. It'd be nice to hear from someone who owns a Sony HDTV.

Btw... Just so you know, Xploder are bringing out something that lets you upgrade anything on the PS2 to 480P, supposdly even upscaling to HD resolutions. Link: Xploder HDTV Player

[andrewfee]

The BRAVIA should have much better scaling / processing than the Toshibas though - you get what you pay for, and with Sony, it's image quality.

They're probably the best HD LCD out there just now for handling SD content, and even RGB should look fairly decent for gaming. (don't expect it to get rid of aliasing though)





Couple of shots of Freeview via my PVR on the 32V2000 I took ages ago. (were just taken at random, wasn't taking anything specifically to try and show it off etc)

EDIT: Images were completely untouched btw, other than a resize they were straight out of my camera.

It's not perfect (or I'd still have one ) and the image is a little on the soft-side; it's not as pin-sharp as some HDTVs I've had, but it's a smooth image that's more natural than most other LCDs out there, and it definitely handles SD far better than the others I've seen, once it's set up right. (the "out of the box" settings are some of the worst I've encountered)

I'm sure most people would be happy with it though. (I wouldn't still recommend it otherwise)

[Aionic]

That looks excellent! Thanks!

Would you mind quickly taking a few pics of a random PS2 game using RGB? I'd love to see what it looks like.

Edit: Any recommendations regarding the settings? All I've got to go on atm is what Lyris said in his review.

Edit 2: Bah, just noticed that you edited your post and don't have it anymore.

[Kotatsu Neko]

The BRAVIA should have much better scaling / processing than the Toshibas though - you get what you pay for, and with Sony, it's image quality.

They're probably the best HD LCD out there just now for handling SD content, and even RGB should look fairly decent for gaming. (don't expect it to get rid of aliasing though)

There's only so much you can do with such low res content though. A PC will scale up video better than just about anything due to the insanely high end GPUs most of us have, but low res is low res at the end of the day.

And SD digtial TV content is doubly bad as it's ultra low res video which is then compressed to within an inch of it's life. I just watch BBC HD now - not many shows on it yet but it's incredibly sharp and beautiful in 1920x1080.

[andrewfee]

That looks excellent! Thanks!

Would you mind quickly taking a few pics of a random PS2 game using RGB? I'd love to see what it looks like.

Edit: Any recommendations regarding the settings? All I've got to go on atm is what Lyris said in his review.

As I said, I don't have it anymore, sorry. PS2 stuff looked fine though.

As for settings - I would leave contrast maxed, and have the backlight on low power saving, somewhere between 3 and 5 iirc. (assuming you don't have an ultra-bright room) Where possible on an LCD, you want to leave the brightness/contrast settings alone. Rather than adjusting contrast, you should use the backlight setting to adjust overall image intensity. (all contrast can do is lower the RGB values which is likely to cause banding and make the images less "clear" whereas the backlight just makes things dimmer and improves black levels)

Brightness was set using a full black screen - as I've got a PVR, I was able to just load up test patterns on it, but if you find either a letterboxed film, or some credits etc, set the TV into 4:3 mode and turn it down until it just blends into those borders. (should be around the default setting) This is much easier to do if you're at a very wide angle. (far easier on other LCDs though, as they tend to have much worse viewing angles than the BRAVIAs)

Turn off all the image processing in the advanced section, other than Gamma Correction, which I believe I had on Low. Make sure the noise reduction is off too.

I think the optimal setting for Sharpness for RGB was somewhere between 9 and 12 - this still adds edge enhancement, but anything lower just blurs the image too much.

I personally preferred to leave "colour space" set to "normal" - neither normal/wide looks "correct" to me though. Wide was actually better overall, but produced some weird errors, like turning some reds/oranges pink, and anything very bright thing like neon colours never looked right to me. Because of this, I preferred to stick to the "normal" setting. Use whichever one you like though - if one or two "off" colours doesn't bother you, use Wide. Regardless of which you prefer, make sure Live Colour Creation is off.

I believe the Colour setting was around 45. Just play around with it until it looks "right" to you. I would avoid going over 50 though, and ideally it would just be set there. (but colours were too strong iirc)

I've used Lyris' settings, but I found them much too dark at the time, losing a lot of shadow detail in particular, and making the colours unnaturally strong. (lowering the brightess much more than a few notches below 50 is a bad idea)

There's only so much you can do with such low res content though. A PC will scale up video better than just about anything due to the insanely high end GPUs most of us have, but low res is low res at the end of the day.

And SD digtial TV content is doubly bad as it's ultra low res video which is then compressed to within an inch of it's life. I just watch BBC HD now - not many shows on it yet but it's incredibly sharp and beautiful in 1920x1080.

I've personally never been happy with PCs scaling or processing video, it's never done as good a job as dedicated hardware. (DVDs have always looked better on my Oppo, no matter what software I use)

It's not going to be perfect of course, but it's far from unwatchable on the BRAVIAs at least.


EDIT: I believe I used the "neutral" colour temperature with "clear white" set to low, which seemed to produce the best greyscale. (although there was perhaps a little too much red, but it was better than "cool")


EDIT2: Here's a couple of direct captures of Channel 5 I took showing CSI:NY aaaaaaaaaages ago when I just got my PVR:





That doesn't look so bad to me, and things seem to have improved since then.

[sj33]

The GPU really makes bugger all difference to the upscaling quality of DVD's, it'll look the same even using some onboard graphics.

I was quite shocked to find that even the new Nvidia PureVideo and ATi AVIVO techs people have been raving about still look like arse compared to my Oppo. Forces me to have to keep my Oppo set up.

[Lyris]

I think the optimal setting for Sharpness for RGB was somewhere between 9 and 12 - this still adds edge enhancement, but anything lower just blurs the image too much.

I disagree. It depends on what you have connected, but for everything I've used, 12 is far too high and adds a lot of fake sharpness. On my HD DVD player I usually have the Sharpness set to about 4.