HD TV General- Need some advice or comments

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RaFi

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Finally bought a HD TV in December, spent most of the time watching Blu-Ray movies, which was nice. Normal TV and even DVDs however looked bad, the TV picture was very blurry, I actually preferred to watch it on a CRT TV because it looks better.

Earlier this week the DSTV decoder decided to call it a day after 10 years, so it was decided to go the whole nine yards, got a PVR HD decoder and Xtraview for the lad.
Had it installed today and activated the setup, no problems there. But, the HD channels looks crap. Normal TV is still blurry. My HD TV indicates that the resolution for the DSTV is 1280x720. Forced it to be 1980x1080, but no improvement to the picture. Although the HD channels look a bit better than normal channels, it is blurry, with loss of detail and I can almost swear the dept of field is very low with the HD channel images. The image seems to constantly try to focus.
I have viewed 720p .mkv movies on the Blu-Ray player and it looks ok, not as good as full HD, but acceptable, however the quality of the DSTV HD channels is much worse than these.

Am I unreasonable, like my wife and a friend suggested. Was I spoiled by the Blu-Ray Disk's quality and is it unfair to compare it to the HD channels on DSTV?
It seems that everyone claim that by using the HD PVR on their HD TV was a great improvement, but honestly at this stage the HD TV is simply not worth it and normal TV looks bad, it is better to use the old CRT TV.

Or are there some settings I can look at that I don't know about, I have to confess I don't know a lot about this sort of thing?

Advice and comments welcome.
 
What TV do you have, how is it setup?

Honestly the DSTV HD channels on my TV are very good (content permitting, some is upscaled 720p). Most movies shown on the HD channels are virtually indistinguishable from Bluray quality, in other words as good as they can be.
 
It a Samsung Series 5 Smart TV, that my wife bought as a Christmas present for her from her without asking me. All the connections to the TV is via HDMI cables. No other changes.

Blu-Ray Disk is great, 1080 .mkv/.mp4 looks just as good, 720 .mkv/.mp4 looks ok, HD Channels on DSTV looks bad, like one of those pirate movies someone tried to push to a higher resolution, with a lot of loss in fine detail, blurry outlines, that sort of thing. This is on all the HD channels even different programs.

I remember when HD TV was just released I watched some nature show on my brothers HD TV and was impressed with the quality, I can also not remember that regular TV looked as bad as it does on mine.
 
What is the HDPVR's HDMI output set to, and what is the TV's Picture Size set to?
 
The TV is at 1920x1080, I can't find the place to change it.

The PVR is set at Original, although I did play with Native and 1080, but there was no difference. I also switched the Blu-Ray and PVR's HDMI cables, with no improvement.
 
RaFi said:
The TV is at 1920x1080, I can't find the place to change it.
Click to expand...
I meant there should be a setting called Picture -> Screen Adjustment -> Picture Size (on my D6000). To have perfect 1:1 pixel mapping with no rescaling distortion, this setting should be set to Screen Fit.

Also remember each HDMI port has its own settings memory, so adjusting settings on one input doesn't affect the others. If setting for Bluray HDMI are good, compare them to settings when on HDPVR's HDMI.

Edit, another one, in a FHD 1:1 mapped picture there is no need to introduce false sharpness, set Sharpness to 0
 
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Ok tried those settings, but no improvement. Maybe I expected too much from the "HD" that DSTV offered. I have seen a 720p HD TV episode of Big Bang Theory and the quality was way better than what DSTV offers.

In the end its my wife's TV and she is happy, so I guess that is all that counts. I will stick to Blu-Ray movies.
 
RaFi said:
Ok tried those settings, but no improvement. Maybe I expected too much from the "HD" that DSTV offered. I have seen a 720p HD TV episode of Big Bang Theory and the quality was way better than what DSTV offers.
Click to expand...
Gotta think there is still something misconfigured (or faulty). For instance MegaMind is playing on MnetHD (ch 170) at the moment, and it is razor sharp & clear on my D6000, even really close up.

I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the 1080i broadcast off my HDPVR2P and the 1080p Bluray playing off my PS3.
 
Sounds like the tv is misconfigured as DSTV is awesome on my D550 series 5
 
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