Originally Posted by andy614:
“I'm aware that i'm probably the only one left in the country but i still have a CRT television. Now it's a very good one, the picture is very good and i'm happy with that, but I would like a bigger one and it is of course cumbersome compared to flat screen tv's, so that would be an advantage.
The thing is, whenever i have gone into the shops and looked at TV, any tv apart from the mega expensive ones seem to have a far worse picture than what i currently have. Either fuzzy, or blocky/pixelated or dodgy motion. I'm not on about the budget options/makes either.
Is this just the case? Is this what i'm going to have to just accept if i want/need a new TV? Is it just the way they are set up in store or something?”
Part of it is this ^
Pretty much everything you can buy now is just one technology - LCD (liquid crystal display) - though you'll see the majority of these TVs referred to as LED instead (light emitting diode) which is the type of light behind the panel and nothing to do with the actual bit responsible for creating the image.
All of these sets are way brighter than CRT TVs. They can (in most cases) produce a much bigger colour range than CRT. It actually exceeds what's required for modern TV pictures. Despite these advantages, the manufacturers still feel the need to make their TVs "
shout" at a customer when on display. This is done in the settings menu by putting the picture on Dynamic mode. This maxes out contrast, makes the image over-sharpened, throws in too much colour, screws up the black/shadow detail and sets most of the picture processing to the highest settings as well.
The other thing it does is an age-old trick of making the colour balance too blue. This makes whites stand out more but has the side effect of screwing up the colour rendition for every other colour. If you have a look at faces then you'll notice they're often magenta (mixed red/blue) rather than pink for Caucasians. To fix this they add a dollop of extra red at the frequency that corresponds to Caucasian skin. They break something and then break another thing else to "fix" it lol.
On top of these issues you have sales people in big stores who haven't a clue what a decent TV picture should actually look like. They're impressed by blistering brightness and day-glo colours. I'm not entirely sure why it is, but when there's a moving image then the average person seems to forget what people actually look like and the way trees and grass and structures should look. If you remember putting in films for developing, if the processor gave you your pictures back with the same kind of picture seetings as most TVs you'd throw them back and say "That's not what it looked like when I took the picture". Yet with TV and film we accept the awful rendition of most TVs.
There's a two stage fix for a lot of this. The first part involves buying and using a picture set-up disc. They're £30-£40 and viewed with scepticism by many. However, as a professional image calibrator myself I can tell you hand on heart that they work wonders for the average TV.
[The sub-stage here is usually "How can I do this for free?" or "Whose settings can I use?"
Some of the set up you can do with downloaded patterns if your PC has a Blu-ray burner or you have a media player that will play the HD media files. You'll be able to do contrast, brightness and sharpness. What you can't do though without the colour filters that come with a purchased disc is look at the colour and tint settings. The purchased test discs also have tutorials to show you what you're adjusting and why. They'll help too with more exotic settings such as Gamma (shadow detail), Colour Temperature, and motion processing.
Using someone else's settings rarely works. The reason is that your TV picture adjustments are in part influenced by the lighting conditions in your room. This is particularly the case with brightness and to a lesser extent Gamma. These then have a knock-on effect over contrast, colour and tint. So using someone else's settings where there room is brighter or darker than yours means that the rest of their settings will be different too. Also, there's no guarantee they set the TV up correctly. I guarantee that the picture of the TV will look different with some settings from a random post. But different doesn't mean better. ]
Good discs to use are [for the novice] Disney WoW (World of Wonder) and Digital Video Essentials HD Basics.
If you wish to really make a TV sing then the second stage is a professional calibration. That's when someone like me turns up with test gear and a light meter and in effect tunes-out all the imperfections in the set to get it as close to reference as the TV will allow. Some in the calibration community just address the colour palette of the TV. Others (myself included) do a whole picture chain calibration. That's a more involved process and takes longer, but it yields far better results. In the end it's down to money and expectations. Calibration is anything from £200 for a basic to over £400 for a complete system.
Typical initial customer reactions after a system calibration are "Wow, look at the colours!" or "I can see so much more detail." This is because all the subtle colour shades that were obscured before now become viewable. Also, when the sharpness and motion processing are optimised then it removes the edge enhancement and false contours added by the processing and allows the real picture detail to be seen.
So, what you see in store is a long way from what's actually possible with TV that's been well sorted. Invest £40 in a test disc and you'll have a tool that will make most TVs significantly better. Professional calibration is a valuable process, and the benefits are even more apparent greater with lower priced TVs, but it's sometimes difficult to justify when the TV cost is £500-£600.