caiman

Well, my friend's actually. He's playing them through his Playstation 3 via HDMI cable on his new Samsung LN-S2641D hdtv. The picture quality is horrendous. We tested it with the Departed and Little Miss Sunshine, and they both look like total shit. Everything is gritty and blurry, with lots of "noise" (not sure what to call it) surrounding every shape.

Games, on the other hand, look fantastic.

We also tested the DVDs on his Xbox360 with component cables. Same result. What is causing this, and what can we do to fix it?

johnglad

Playstation 3 is a poor dvd player (480p), but if the movies look the same in DIFFERENT players, then you just arent enjoying 480i or 480p on a big hdtv. Maybe he has a weird setting for 480i or 480p? A noise reduction or sharpness issue? Both of those movies should look as nice as dvd can basically. Sounds like your friend just needs to go to BluRay and live the high life.

SoSpacey

I am assuming the Samsung is a 26" LCD flat panel?

1-PS3 does not upconvert.

2- Does he have the output on the PS3 set to 720p? If so, change it to 1080i. The PS3 does not support 720p right now, although it will in April (i think) with a firmware release. The Samsung supports 1080i.

3- (This is the one that may help the most) Try to hook up via componentas well as HDMI. For SD-DVDs, component may just send the signal raw to your TV and the scalers in your TV may do a good job with the upconversion. Change the video output on the PS3 to component and hook up the optical audio to the receiver. I would try that as I think that is what will make the most difference.

Drexl

You'll want to check off 720p and 1080i, because if you only check off 1080i, 720p games will be downconverted to 480p. BD movies will automatically play in 1080i because it's considered higher than 720p.

mzupeman2

Well if there is a ton of grain and noise, he may want to check his sharpness settings for that input as well. If that input was calibrated just for HD signals from the PS3 while playing PS3 games, then he may have just failed to significantly reduce the sharpness. That will bring out all the noise and grain.

Drexl

This could be the problem. It's possible that the sharpness control has no effect on HD signals, so that's why they look fine. Aside from the "blurry" part (and after all, DVDs are just going to look a little blurry on an HDTV), Caiman's description seems to match what you would see if the sharpness was turned up too much.

mzupeman2

Depending on the TV, a lot of people would recommend for SD-DVD's on an HD-TV to have the sharpness set at 0. This brings out the natural image the DVD intends. To a lot of people, this doesn't look sharp enough so they turn it up until they feel comfortable with the image overall. Increasing sharpness will be a give and take situation. You'll see grain a little bit more, and on some DVD's you may notice some edge enhancement where it may have been too dull for you to notice before. You should be able to find a pretty nice balance though. My Sony rear projection 42" LCD, I use a sharpness setting of 20. It gives you a sharp image, and most of the time as long as things are encoded well enough, the image looks pretty good.