Fed up with my Sony Bravia TV.

Dunkyboy_2

I have a 6 month old 40" Sony Bravia KDL 40T2800, and i'm absolutly fed up with it.

Why?

Well, first off, let me say the TV is in perfect condition, there are no technical faults with it, as an engineer has checked it out.

The problem is the quality of the picture. By this i mean that when watching certain types of programms the tv makes my eyes hurt:eek: , i kid you not.
The best example is watching Match of the day, where there is a lot of green (grass) in the background and then the players running around, and the camera constantly moving back and forward following the action, the result of watching this for half an hour is to make you feel slightly giddy.
The picture is always slightly out of focus, just a little blurry, untill the action slows down and then everything suddenly pops into focus again, untill the action starts again and then were back to a fuzzy picture.
So your eyes are constantly trying to adjust to compensate for the the fuzzy picture.

For things like watching soaps/news etc, it is fine, but any fast action stuff it is CRAP.
I live in Cumbria, and we only get a digital signal now, (the analogue signal is now off for us), and we watch through a ordinary ariel recieving the Freeview signal. We recieve a full strenght signal.
We use a Daewoo hard-drive recorder to record programmes.

Why can't we get a better picture, the engineer who checked out the telly told us the quality of Standard Definition (SD) is pretty poor, and just before he went he played us some film of the red arrows from his laptop through our tv that was in HD and the picture was incredible, sharp from corner to corner.

Has anybody any suggestions how to improve the picture.
If i got sky HD would this be the solution.
Should i get rid of this tv and get a smaller screen one (which is what the engineer suggested, he said the problem is the same but it will be less noticable)

I'm throughly fed up , having spent a small fortune to go Digital (because the Government thinks it best,) i have the most expensive tv i've ever bought , and the worst picture i've ever had:mad: .

Thanks for lookiing.
If i could have my none Digital 28" toshiba back, i'd be delighted.

Dunkyboy_2

Have posted this from work, will be on line later this affy.

Conor_3

Dunkyboy wrote: »

Why can't we get a better picture, the engineer who checked out the telly told us the quality of Standard Definition (SD) is pretty poor, and just before he went he played us some film of the red arrows from his laptop through our tv that was in HD and the picture was incredible, sharp from corner to corner.

Has anybody any suggestions how to improve the picture.
If i got sky HD would this be the solution.
Should i get rid of this tv and get a smaller screen one (which is what the engineer suggested, he said the problem is the same but it will be less noticable)

Standard definition broadcasts are going to be as you described, you cannot change that. There's nothing you can do to improve it. Basically you've got a 480 horizontal line picture being displayed on a TV with 1080 horizontal lines so you're going to get blurry edges and pixellation. Sky HD would be a solution but it would only be for the HD channels, not every channel.

A smaller screen will reduce it but I have a 32" and it's still very noticable.

feesh

We thought our Samsung telly was pretty awful at first, but we went online and found the "ideal" settings. (Off a techie forum, I think it was avforums.co.uk).

We spent 10 minutes or so changing every single setting in the menu according to the guidance we had got off the forums (some of the settings were counter-intuitive) but once we had done it, we got an amazing picture.

We went from thinking we had a really awful telly, to a really fantastic one, and there's no way we would have been able to do it without getting those settings dictated to us - like I say, some of them were counter-intuitive and never in a millions years would we have come up with all the right settings just from sitting at home playing with the menu options.

feesh

By the way 40" is HUGE! If you don't have a massive living room, you are probably sitting too close to it - no wonder it looks bad.

We have a 26" in our admittedly small living room - but it's great now we've got it set up correctly.

There are guidelines on which TV size is appropriate for which room size - maybe check them out and see if you need to downgrade at all? I think I would get a headache looking at a 40" screen, even if it was set up perfectly! (In fact I know from experience that I would - my cousin has one, and I much prefer to sit in front of our 26 incher!).

Acehole_2

can't help with your problem i'm afraid, but we have a new samsung 40" lcd, we changed from a 42" sony rear projection. we are having to get used to a picture so good !! the people on screen look like they are in the room with you, thats from a normal sky input, not HD, nothing but praise for the set. It's not even a top notch version or latest model, think it's 2 generations old, but it is very good indeed.
hope you resolve your issues soon one way or another

isofa

Well just for balance, we have a high end 28" Sony CRT widescreen TV on freeview and the picture is beautiful. I still find LCDs too harsh. We have quite a decent sized living room, but wouldn't want anything larger, perhaps when we move to LCD, we'll go for 32", purely as the physical size will be the same, but I wouldn't want anything larger.

You'd need to be a long way from a 40" screen not to get eye-strain IMO, it's massive!

Inactive

A Plasma TV would have been a better choice at that size to watch SD material, I have one and it has a fantastic picture on SD material, it shows none of the symptoms that you describe.;)

unrich

What you see are the artifacts of lossy compression. A result of the inexorable march of technology and lowering acceptable quality. 50 channels all broadcast at a lower quality.

We have a 40" bravia and its brilliant with DVDs.
But you can still see the graduations from one shade of black to another and the fuzzy grass on MOTD. These problems are where the compression has been turned up to save on bandwidth during broadcast.

I sit about 12' away from our TV and its just right for me.

We have a second freeview box for watching one thing and DVDing another. The quality of this is worse than the built in receiver.

Short of satelite I don't think you'll make it better.

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Some people as above do say plasma is better for action where as TFT/LCD is better for colour and contrast.
I have onlt noticed this on MOTD (especially minor matches) and really dark DVDs.

aliEnRIK

Go into the menu and switch off ALL the extra rubbish thats on (digital contrast filters and suchlike)

BillScarab

Whta you are describing sound like some of the typical issues people have with LCD TV's. Personally I prefer plasmas as they tend to handle Standard Definition pictures better.

You could have kept your non-diigtal Toshibna and bought a freeview box for it.

It may be worth checking on Avforums to see if anyone has any optimum settings for your TV as suggested above.

This article suggests how far you should be sitting from various size TVs.