Hi everybody

I'm totally new to the flatscreen game, so please be gentle :

Have just traded in my Phillips CRT for a Panasonic Viera TX-P42U30. Set it up today and so far I'm really pleased with the picture quality (much better than the LG LCD I tried out last year)

However, I've a few questions (and they may be numpty-ish, so I apologise in advance):

Since setting up the television, autotuning both analogue and freeview channels, now our CRT television we have in our bedroom doesn't work anymore. Presumably it's an ariel problem? I can kind of make out a couple of channels, but the picture is so snowy as to be unwatchable. The CRT bedroom television had a freeview box, but now all freeview channels in the bedroom are coming up as 'No Signal'.

I was under the impression that both televisions had their own ariel but my OH says that when he moved into the house he had it set up so that he had an ariel splitter. I didn't live here at the time.

Also - the new plasma has (at the moment) nothing attached to it apart from my DVD player (we no longer have a downstairs Freeview box and I don't have Sky or equivalent) This DVD player doesn't have an HDMI socket, so is attached to the television via SCART. The picture quality on playback of DVD disks isn't great. I mean, it's ok but not half as sharp as it used to be on our CRT TV. Do you think picture quality of DVD disks would be improved if I bought a blu-ray player and attached it via HDMI to the TV? Or similarly if I bought a PS3 player? Would either of these improve DVD picture quality?

And why isn't DVD picture quality as good now? Just out of interest

Make sure that everything is connected up to the new TV as it was to the old TV.

For the aerial, in both rooms, if you have a splitter, then it should go, in both rooms:

Aerial>splitter>sent to individual rooms.

Then Aerial socket>Freeview box>TV.

If you still wish to receive analogue transmissions (for the time being) on the CRT TV, then another cable should come from the RF Out or TV out socket on the back of the Freeview box. Digital from the Freeview box will only be supplied through the SCART socket, meaning most Freeview boxes will not have the option of tuning the Freeview channel to one of the TVs numbered presets.

Is the Freeview box the same one that's always been upstairs? Or is it a different one?


There should be some kind of setting(s) in your TV to reduce this "blockiness" that you'll be seeing.

The basic reason why is simply because a HD TV has more lines of definition (1080) on the picture - to make the picture sharper. DVDs were set to be played back at the resolution of your old set - good old 625 lines.

Regarding DVD disks - there would only be little improvement - the problem is the original source (the DVD disk) was written with that picture quality. To get optimum quality from Blu-Ray, you'd need a blu-ray player *and* blu-ray discs. Please be aware that Blu-Ray discs will only play in B-R players. DVD discs will play in both DVD players and B-R players.

Basically, your TV is of a better picture quality than the signal it is receiving.

is your scart in a RGB socket in both TV and DVD player, with settings on RGB

my 50 " Panny good through Scart

page 24 of manual shows RGB in the only scart socket

Removing one output from a passive aerial splitter shouldn't make any difference to the reception on the other TV however aerial splitter is some form of distribution amplifier/booster which requires a power supply which you have removed. With some amplifiers the power supply is at the TV end of the cable and the power to the amplifier flows up one of the aerial leads. When you had a clear out of the old equipment was the aerial lead plugged into a small box with a mains connection?



Are you sure that you have it connected via the best output standard? A SCART cable can carry a composite signal, which is the worst quality and can look ~*#!, or a RGB signal (Red, Green, Blue) which should give a far superior picture quality.

Furthermore, if your equipment has more than one SCART connector you may only be able to input or output RGB on one of them.

So,
Make sure that both pieces of equipment are set-up to input/output RGB and maybe experiment with swapping the connectors around.

CVBS = Composite (worst video quality)
RGB = Red, Green Blue (best picture quality)
YUV = Component (best picture quality) but you probably nead a breakout lead and a different connection into the TV.
S-Video = medium video quality requiring a different lead.

You can get DVD players with HDMI leads fairly cheaply now.

I have one of the new Xbox 360s (you can buy them from Amazon). It's connected up via HDMI to my Panasonic P42G20B.

DVDs look great on it, can stream DivX content to it from laptop, can stream HD content to it. (The HD it can do is only marginally worse than blu-ray, most people won't be able to tell the difference).

Also via the Xbox you can rent and buy movies to play on your TV. Most come with an HD option which is almost-bluray. There's also an SD option which lets you buy and download them to your Xbox and to your PC. (Zune video marketplace).

Thank you to everyone for taking the time to reply.

When I've woken up a bit I shall take another look at the tv bearing in mind what you've suggested

Very simply with the DVD picture-its crap because the sets built in upscaler is crap. Plus HDTV's generally don't like Scart, its HDMI all the way now. Don't worry that's not just a Panasonic fault they are all sub standard on all brands-its a cynical way of keeping the cost of the set down, and getting you to buy a new player.

If you buy either a upscaling DVD player or Blu-Ray player you will find they can upscale the picture far better than the vaseline scaler your TV is probably fitted with. As to what brand of player to get: I would either get a Panasonic or a Sony. If you shop around you should find a decent entry level Blu-Ray from either of these companies for around the £100 mark.

One of the best things about Panny Plasmas is that when they've been paired up with something that can upscale well, you should find the DVD picture is not far off Blu-Ray quality. Should give your DVD collection a new lease of life. Plasma tech is much better in this regard than LCD in this regard when it comes to upscaling.

Wouldn't Panasonic use the same technology for up-scalling in all their products? You have told the OP that the up-scaller in his Panasonic TV is crap and then recommend a box from the same stable that is built down to a lesser price.

Some dvd vs bluray screen cap comparisons.
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u...c/348260d5.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u...c/f78b44b0.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u...c/90a70071.png
http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u...c/c6e4ea9b.png

Bluray is 5-6x the resolution of dvd. We are talking 2 million pixels of Bluray vs 400k of dvd. You are hooking up your dvd through scart, analog, it is being digitized and upscaled by the tv, soft by default, you send something fuzzy to get blown up, you get more fuzzy. Upscaling dvd players with hdmi upscale before they send, digitally, which suffers less loss, but in any case they cannot create detail from nothing, all they are doing is mapping fewer pixels to more pixels in the least ugly way possible. Crt size and interlacing and the way it worked helped mask the inherent lack of detail in dvd. But watch a bluray of 2001 or sound of music and you see in any case, dvd is pretty much not worth worrying about anymore.

The scaler isn't crap. Almost no tv scale 480i analog well. Such a low resolution analog signal is going to be upscaled poorly by default. The dvd players upscaler is no better, it simply has a clean digital source to work with, not being fed junk by a scart cable.

As for far off, I'd say it is still pretty far off from bluray having it myself. 42" is kind of small though so it might make less of a difference, the only sources that look even remotely similar are cg films where the detail is lacking by default, most of it is smooth gradient shading and such..which of course is always a good showroom cheat, showing off tv's with cg films makes most any tv look half decent.

JT Effect...

The picture quality from DVD is fine. Those of us with projectors have been watching DVD on screens up to 120" diagonal for a dozen or more years, so getting a reasonable picture on a 42" screen shouldn't be a major problem.

Also, as long as the SCART cable is of decent quality then RGB SCART is perfectly good enough connection. It's very close to what's coming off the DVD disc.

What you're probably noticing is a combination of the TV settings being a little off along with the larger screen size.

Here are a few things to check before you start thinking of spending money on new players...

1) DVD player set up menus - Picture output to SCART RGB
Some players have picture enhancement settings too. If yours does then switch them off.

2) TV set up menus - If the picture preset is on Dynamic then switch it to Normal. Reduce the Sharpness setting to 0. The contrast should probably come down a few notches too. Switch off the CATS and Vivid Colour features and have a look in the TV's Advanced menu to see that the Resolution Enhancer feature is set to Off. (See pg 28 of the Panasonic TV manual)

Give these a whirl first then come back and tell us how you got on.

Chris Frost - and everyone else.

Thank you for your replies, once again (I especially like the analogy of 'if you blow something fuzzy up, you just get more fuzzy ) I really appreciate everyone's input.

Since it was the Bank Holiday weekend, I went out yesterday and bought a PS3 player, and it plays my DVDs just fine, and seems to look a little better (but that may be just in my head ) and I can't wait to start buying blu-ray discs.

I started a thread last year when I'd bought a LCD television about how spectacularly underwhelmed by picture quality (our mahoosive CRTsoon got dragged back into its place!) I was, but I followed the advice of people on here and got a plasma instead and have been so pleased so far with the results *crosses fingers*

Oh - and alan_m ... I'm a girl, not a guy, lol.

The main problem is the fact that I seem to have lost my freeview channels on my CRT upstairs. Since we got the new television and tuned in the freeview channels on it, the one upstairs is now saying 'No signal'. The ariel (upstairs) is attached to our DVD recorder. I suppose I could just stick it back in the set top box and retune upstairs ... I'm just worried that it will then make us lose the channels on the new plasma and a vicious circle will ensue.

I have no clue how our ariels are set up ... and my OH has tried all sorts of permutations with the 4-way ariel amplifier and that white ariel splitter we've got behind the tv, that eventually we gave up trying (for now) as we just wanted to enjoy watching our new tv.

But cheers again

No they wouldn't, a number of people have commented on the poor performance of the scalers in Panasonic TV's, but BD players are usually fine.

Even Sony TV's which have excellent scalers (some of the best fitted in TV's) aren't as good as Sony BD players. I suspect a larger proportion of the cost of the unit is used for the scaling technology.

You often repeat this but I see no evidence of this. Certainly with my own Panny TV I've never used any pre-upscaling (before my BD player) as the results were worse than letting the TV do it.

Quite a LOT of people here have commented on the poor scaling performance, perhaps it was just the older Panasonics? - certainly it was refering to the Thomson HD boxes scaling performance been better than the TV's.

Since those comments here I've NEVER happened to install Sky HD on a Panasonic set, because I want to try it when I get the chance,

On mine I seem to get the best performance for SD by using RGB SCART (presumably poor de-interlacing in my Sky+HD) and probably the worst by using 1080i. I say "seem" and "probably" because this is not double blind and may well be placebo affect.

What is clear is that the differences are minor and I could not tell which method was being used at a particular time with transmission bandwidth having a much greater affect (unlike say with composite and RGB where the difference is very obvious). Because of this I just use Automatic over HDMI for convenience.

It's sometimes hard to tell - fortunately I'm in the situation (at work at least) where I can connect two identical sets to the same box for comparisons.

On Sony sets it's usually 'slightly' better via RGB SCART, but not enough to make it worthwhile using Automatic with the attendent slow channel changing. Certainly as an installer, I ALWAYS set the boxes to 1080i

That's obvious. You keep typing "ariel" (a brand of washing powder) instead of "aerial".

Jeez - what a prat!

(me, not you, of course )