Yep, that the other major mistake. Users often do not attempt to calibrate their TV sets specifically for each device on each input (and for their room)! And like you say, just leave the TV settings as factory set...

I have no time for people who complained about poor/soft PQ and have not considered the above, and prefer digital artifacts over smooth and non-distracting upscaling!

Dead on, I have a Sony Bravia, the default settings are nothing short of completely unwatchable.

I tested Scart versus HDMI and HDMI was way sharper for me, even my daughter noticed the difference. But the picture was dull and whites were muddy grey, because the HDMI input was still on factory settings whereas the scart had been heavily tweaked. Nevertheless I did still notice that the HDMI needed to be tweaked brighter in the settings. I still had an issue until I found the "light sensor" setting which is meant to adjust brightness to lighting conditions, turned it off and wow suddenly the programs look like they were filmed at noon rather than mid afternoon in Winter.

Your typical Currys will have a wall of TVs normally viewed under bright ambient lighting from a greater distance than at home. If Sony's defaults were ideal for normal home viewing, the picture would look dull and soft and punters would go for a set on the wall with defaults set for showrooms.


I also have a Sony Bravia and initially had problems with the "light sensor". I solved it in a different way. I left the "light sensor" on but turned the backlight up to full. I also adjusted brightness so that the blacks were just black and then set the gamma to "low" under advanced settings. Gamma defaults to "off" which is even lower. The gamma setting enhances detail in shadow areas without blowing out the highlights. The overall effect is a picture that is just bright enough under artificial lighting and has nice blacks and shadow detail. When daylight is flooding into the room, it automatically increases the brightness so that there is little apparent difference in the picture whatever the lighting conditions.

Is it just me that finds the Guide hard to read ?
The time line is the worst but all the rest suffers from poor contrast.
I stopped the "transparency" option since that made it worse.
Reading Text news is better than with my Pace Sky+.
The picture is very slightly better for me than Sky+, though my wife finds no difference.

No, it's not just you.

I don't know what genius decided that white on light grey was a good clolour scheme for readability but he should be put on other duties.

Thanks Tern,
Perhaps the "genius" has shares in Specsavers !
The only word that is properly readable is "freesat" in top left.
Change it all to black on white.
The current chosen program could be outlined in red. Other outlines in grey.
I like the idea of a brief description above the time-line but the rest in black is repeated elsewhere, & the space would be better used to give ten programs per page.

Well, mine is calibrated within an inch of its life. Sharpness is at 0 and, after a lot of experimentation, edge enhancement on low on the Reon HQV upscaler. Contrast was set with a colourimeter, and its greyscale tracking has delta errors of 3 or less for most of the luminance scale.

The calibration was done with a dvd, and that's as far as I can get because the set does not have different memories for different inputs and I don't have a pattern generator anyway, but still it's a long way from its out of the box state.

The foxsat looks soft, and not in a good way since it still has artefacts. I recently got hold of a fortec passion+ and I'm fairly certain it's better, soft but acceptably so, and sometimes looking quite crt-like on the higher bit rate channels. I'll have to get them both hooked up at the same time to comment any further, but that's my first impression.

But still, other people obviously get different results, though the point about how people have different opinions on the trade-off between detail and noise does make absolute judgments difficult. But I got the box on day one, and I wonder whether later shipments made improvements on the first ones. Wouldn't be the first time I've been caught like that!

You obviously know what you are doing but, to state the obvious, what you have done is optimise your TV for the decoder (and upscaler, if any) in your DVD player. The settings may not be the best for the HDR.

Could the foxsat be so far from the dvd player (a ps/3, in fact)?

As I say, there aren't per-input memories on this panel so it would be fiddly to change settings for different sources all the time, but if you have any suggestions for finding optimal settings for a device which isn't a dvd player I'd be very happy to try them out of sheer curiosity.

Edit: it's the hd, not hdr. Perhaps I could try to *something* with the test card on the BBC HD loop, but that is complicated because the panel does have SD and HD memories! I'd also have to be quick, and I'm not sure what you can do with a test card anyway beyond checking black and white levels, which on a quick look seemed fine when I tried.

It all depends on how the chip maunufacturer implemented the decoding/scaling and where they set the trade off between detail and noise. So, yes they probably could be quite different. That's really the basis of the complaint some people have about the Humax receivers - they don't like the particular implementaion (whereas others do).

I can see why you would use a DVD for the settings as predicability makes things so much easier. However, if there is a difference between the sources, which do you watch most - DVD or freesat?


I don't think the test card is going to work for you. Apart from the reason you stated, it's HD and I thought the PQ issue only related to SD. You would need a typical SD programme for the "try out". The best I can think of for sharpness and noise reduction settings is a programme with a lot of predictable detail in it. Something like BBC News might work. The ticker at the bottom of the screen would be good for this and you can check that settings that are optimum for the ticker don't do horrible things to people's faces. BBC Alba during the day is another possibility as it is just text. The problem with both of these is that they do not have as high a bit rate as the main BBC channels (BBC News is better than BBC Alba).

Personally, I haven't bothered with the sort of precision you are looking for. I spent a few minutes adjusting my TV by looking out for sharp vertical detail in the picture and then checking that I had not done horrible things to textured areas. I did tweak it a few times before I was satisfied (or, more likely, got bored doing it). I used BBC1 as I thought this sort of thing needed to be done on the best quality transmission.

Yes, it is just SD, which is why changing HD settings when they only affect HD wouldn't help me.

OK, I'll approach it with an open mind when I get the foxsat back online. I've written down the settings it took me many hours to arrive at so I don't mind changing them for purposes of experimentation. And it is just that, since for SD I use a Topfield freeview pvr, which looks a lot better. (I really don't want to start the whole cycle over again in saying that though. )

Cheers.

Oh wow - yes - in terms of the image compression.

DVD has a bit rate around 6Mbps compared to 3.5Mbps for the best SD channels and 1.8Mbps for the worst ones.
BBC1 comes in at 4.5Mbps for Freeview but less for satellite as I recall.

BBC1 bit rates seem to vary with region according to SatcoDx. From a very quick scan it looks as if BBC1 London is the worst with an average of 3.13Mbps and BBC1 Northern Ireland is the best with an average of 4.45Mbps ( see my location). But, these figures may not be very reliable. A lot depends on how they are measured.

Yes, I appreciate that--it's painfully obvious every day--but its consequences for optimal picture settings are less clear. The latest posts in the thread have been about manufacturers' decisions about how to cope with reduced bitrate artefacts at a hardware/firmware level, which makes it even less clear.

Indeed it does make it less clear. There's probably no single best setting for all channels. That sort of makes my approach (tweaking things on a normal programme until I got bored with it) more sensible than I thought it was. I was a little ashamed to admit to that . Now I feel justified . Next week, it'll be the reason I did it that way .

This didn't really work due to strobe effects.

My SD PQ has got better with age. My HDR is about a month old now and it has definitely improved. PQ was noticably worse than my Humax 9200t connected to the same Panny plasma but is now slighter sharper and with better colour and contrast, as it should be if HDMI is supposed to be better connection than scart.

I think only real difference between freesat and freeview is with the ITV and Channel 4 channels (apart from More 4) which use a lower resolution, BBC and Five both use maximum resolution and regularly seem to go over 4Mbps.

Lol

.

How do you do this? I have looked all through the menus and can not find an option for this.

keep pressing v-format on the remote it will cycle through all the options.

OK thanks. Strange thing is when selecting original my Samsung still says the input signal is 1080i. Selecting 1080i or original definately gives a better pq then the 576i and 720i settings.

Does anyone know if there is a way adjust the contrast on the Humax HDR box? I believe that on Sky boxes you can set it to low, medium or high.

On original it should say 1080i for HD material and 576i for SD material. My TV certainly does.

Check in your TV manual that the hdmi supports 576i over hdmi (some don't)
Last edited by grahamlthompson : 31-01-2009 at 16:15

I will hunt my manual out later have a look to see if it does.

When setting the Humax to 576p and pressing info on my Samsung remote it says 720x576@50Hz, When setting the Humax to 720p my tv reports the input as 1280x780@50Hz. When setting the Humax to 1080i my tv reports the signal as being 1920x1080i@50Hz as it does when setting the Humax to original. Also when changing from 1080i to original the tv display does not go blank while the Humax is swithching resolution as it does while switching through the other resolutions.

I have just tried setting my Philips upscaling DVD to 576i but 576i is not listed. The availible options are Auto,480p,576p,1080i and 1080p and if I remember correctly the Philips only offers what your tv supports so you may be right.

Thanks for your reply.

There is another issue with using the "Original" setting in V-Format when feeding the HDMI TV input from the Humax HDR (apart from the already mentioned blanking when switching) and that is that it also reverts the DOGs to SD in the process and this actually adds to the perception of poorer fuzzy or "soft" definition of SD when in 576i/SD mode.

Personally, leaving it at 1080i output from the Humax is much more preferable than having it set to "Original" since this leaves all the graphics in HD and actually, since I think this leaves the HDR to do the upscaling, the SD quality looks better (feeding my Sony Bravia KDL-32W4000 anyway) overall.

(Perhaps double upscaling may be a factor in some situations?)
Last edited by CPN : 31-01-2009 at 19:46