[kyliem]

Hi,
I have just upgraded to HD and purchased a Samsung 3D HD TV and Bluray player. Just a quick question, why does the quality vary so much?
A couple of examples, watching The Apprentise on BBC HD last night, the picture was fantastic, as it is on most HD channels, but then watching New Tricks a few days ago, also on BBC HD the picture quality was quite poor. This does not happen on many HD channels I watch, but why is there such a difference and is there anything that can be done to improve this.
Secondly, watching a Bluray DVD also gives an awesome picture, but if I try to watch a standard DVD the picture is aweful, I dont expect it to be of the same quality as Bluray, but they are almost unwatchable. Any ideas?
thanks in advance.

[late8]

There's a few factors. Usually on TV HD the difference program to program its what they have done with the video and how they have produced the video. Digital Cameras in my opinion produce a nice sharp HD picture. The Apprentice and studio stuff is all digital stuff- nice crisp and colourfull - but sometimes they add film effects and noise- especially to dramas that make it look poor, grey and smudgy and not really worth the HD tag.

Bit-rate is also a factor.

The DVD picture might be down to the upscaleing process - your picture shouldn't be awful - infact it should be pretty good and much better than normal TV channels. Try setting your Bluray to 576 output or 720 and see if there's a difference or a auto setting.

[chrisjr]

First thing I did with my telly was turn off all the Dynamic this, that and the other it has in the picture set-up menu. The only thing they do is knacker the picture. That won't address every single issue but can make a real difference overall.

For the TV programmes the "problem" may not be anything you have control over. It could simply be the way the programme director wanted the show to look like. So nothing really that can be done to sort that one out.

There is no real reason why a DVD should be so inferior to Blu-Ray. Obviously the resolution will be lower but it should not be unwatchable. That suggests the process of upscaling the DVD image to fit the screen is maybe going wrong somewhere. Or as I said in the opening paragraph the dynamic processing is screwing things up.

If you set the player output to 1080 video mode then the player upscales the image. If you set it to Auto or similar then the TV upscales. So try both settings to see if there is any difference between them. Then pick whichever does the better job.

[gomezz]

Bear in mind New Tricks is not even shot in HD.

[pocatello]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kyliem

Hi,
I have just upgraded to HD and purchased a Samsung 3D HD TV and Bluray player. Just a quick question, why does the quality vary so much?
A couple of examples, watching The Apprentise on BBC HD last night, the picture was fantastic, as it is on most HD channels, but then watching New Tricks a few days ago, also on BBC HD the picture quality was quite poor. This does not happen on many HD channels I watch, but why is there such a difference and is there anything that can be done to improve this.
Secondly, watching a Bluray DVD also gives an awesome picture, but if I try to watch a standard DVD the picture is aweful, I dont expect it to be of the same quality as Bluray, but they are almost unwatchable. Any ideas?
thanks in advance.

Kyliem bluray = 2 million pixels. Dvd = ~350-400k pixels. That is multiples of difference and you can't get around that, Dvd got away with looking rubbish because for most of its life almost no one had a TV big enough to see any different.

Broadcast channels suffer from over compression or bad production, which is responsible for for a specific shows low quality I don't know. Or it could be an upscaled aka resized SD source show.

[kyliem]

Thanks for all the advice, will put it in to practise tomorrow and see what happens.