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Help with new TV
andy614
Posts: 45,259 Forum Member
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After sticking with my old CRT for many years, a few days ago i bought an new 42 in LED TV by LG.
However, i am incredibly disappointed with the picture. The picture isn't even half as good as my old tv. The HD channels are fine but i'm really not sure i can live with the normal channels. The picture is a grainy and fuzzy and there is a lot of noise around/in everything, motion blur ect ect. It's just not a crisp, clear good picture really at all.
I've tried playing around with the settings and stuff but nothing seems to really help.
At this point i actually feel like going back to an old style CRT television as i was perfectly happy with the picture, i thought i would be getting an upgrade by getting a LED but i don't feel that way at all now.
Is it just the particular TV? The make? The fact it's not a mega expensive one? Or will i just find that is the case with LED/LCD tv's?!
However, i am incredibly disappointed with the picture. The picture isn't even half as good as my old tv. The HD channels are fine but i'm really not sure i can live with the normal channels. The picture is a grainy and fuzzy and there is a lot of noise around/in everything, motion blur ect ect. It's just not a crisp, clear good picture really at all.
I've tried playing around with the settings and stuff but nothing seems to really help.
At this point i actually feel like going back to an old style CRT television as i was perfectly happy with the picture, i thought i would be getting an upgrade by getting a LED but i don't feel that way at all now.
Is it just the particular TV? The make? The fact it's not a mega expensive one? Or will i just find that is the case with LED/LCD tv's?!
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Go into the picture setting menu and find every option with the word Dynamic in the title and turn them all off. I have an LG TV and it is the first thing I did and it does make a difference. All the so called picture enhancement features seem to do is conspire to make the picture worse than it is when they are all turned off.
I also found that out of the box the colour balance was way out. It made people look like they had over indulged in a spray tanning booth!
You need to tweak the settings carefully a bit at a time to get a decent picture. Don't dive in changing loads of settings all at once in a mad rush. Even better if you have a DVD or Blu Ray player is to find a calibration disk and use that to set up the TV. But bear in mind that each input source on the TV can be set-up separately. So if you tweak it for one of the HDMI inputs the Freeview setting will be completely different unless you copy the settings.
And you will notice just how crap some SD channels are (ITV 4 was particularly bad at the start) on a large screen TV. Even on some Sony and Panasonic sets I've seen the artefacts from too little bandwidth allocated to some channels are clearly visible.
Oh and by the way it is an LCD TV, the LEDs are only used to backlight the display panel they don't create the image which is all LCD.
Some are better than others in scaling the SD picture up to 1920x1080 pixels (or whatever the resolution is in your telly).
And yes, the price point plays a big part in that.
I have a Samsung 40" LCD (5 series) that has an excellent picture on the SD channels.
It cost me £650 about 5 and a half years ago, so not super expensive at the time, but I bought it from a shop, and a good SD picture was my priority at the time, so I compared them.
My nephew has an LG 42" LCD from a lower price range, and the SD picture on that is not very good at all, similar to yours.
I'm not saying Samsung is better than LG, just that these TVs were from different price ranges.
But nothing beats comparing them in a shop, even if you later buy online. ;-)
Incidentally, my Brother has a 42" Panasonic plasma TV, and that has a really excellent SD picture. But plasmas are getting more scarce and have their disadvantages as well (more bulky/heavy, power consumption).
If it really bothers you, a way round it might be to buy a Freeview box with HDMI out, and set it to output at 1080i or 1080p. Then it would be the box doing the scaling rather than the TV, and it might do a better job.
But if you've only just bought the TV you might be able to return it, and maybe do some more research before you choose an alternative.
I did see various 4k tv's in the shop, though i just assumed that that would only apply to HD channels anyway so it wouldn't really make a difference to the picture on normal channels?
I must say that pretty much all the TV's i looked at in store looked to have a dodgy picture to me, save for the mega bucks ones.
4k refers to the screen resolution. This means that even broadcast HD has to be upscaled to fill the screen. And SD has to be scaled even more than if you had a standard HD set so could look even worse. Depending on the quality of the scaler, which might be better in a 4k TV as it may be considered a premium product, though no guarantees.
You need to be careful when comparing TVs in shops. it would be very simple indeed for them to set up the cheaper sets to look poorer than the more expensive models. Especially the big out of town sheds like Currys. Somewhere like John Lewis might be more even handed in how it sets up it's displays.
The quality will vary from channel to channel. Bbc 1+2 are usually very good, whereas chs such as itv4 are often quite poor quality.
Freesat tends (and I guess sky as well as the free chs are the same) to provide a marginally cleaner image on sd channels than freeview.
The quality of the source material will also make a difference.
Dvd provides the best sd solution although your still at the mercy of the source material on the disc.
I have often found an improvement can be made to sd pictures if the device be it a freeview/freesat/sky box, or DVD player is connected via Hdmi rather than scart (and adjusting the devices output quality setting eg 1080i or 1080p) once you have done so can improve sd pictures from those devices.
Try setting up using this guide: https://www.avforums.com/PicturePerfect/
I think i will end up taking this back, so does anyone have any hints or tips in terms of choosing another one? particular make? Particular TV itself? Specs to look out for?
I'm looking to spend about £400 - £500.
Tried changing settings but cannot get it right.
Though picture is great on HD & Dvd.
Though anglia news is fine on my Iiyama ProLite XB2783 the screen is much better with SD stuff.
I also don't believe that anyone would turn down the benefits of buying from JL on the spurious basis of the demo tvs not being set up correctly. You'd ask surely, and have someone who knows go through it , set it up properly and demo it as the maker intended.
How far away are you watching? There needs to be quite a distance or it will look like fuzzy especially close up.