New Samgsung 58" picture not sharp watching DVD

[riogrande]

I've had a Samsung 46" LCD (touch of color) 1080P TV for about 8 years - always has a great picture but there was a good price on Samsung 58" LED 1080P smart TV yesterday so I pulled the trigger since I've wanted a larger TV for the living room for a few years now. Target had 10% off and $50 gift card so final cost was about $380 total; seemed pretty good for a TV of that size.

Took home the new Samsung - the extra 12" size is major over the 46". We have been using my wifes sons Xbox 1 as a picture source (HDMI cable hookup) for the past year - it streams Netflix and we watch DVDs from the Redbox etc. So we hook up the Xbox 1 and watch something on Netflix and it looks pretty good - I realize too that Netflix picture quality varies depending on bandwidth but over all mostly very decent and as expected.

Later on we got a DVD out of Redbox and I couldn't help but notice how lousy the picture looked. I was used to usually being impressed by the picture on my 8 year old 46", sharp and clear etc. Mostly the DVD movie just didn't look crisp and sharp - it looked definitely worse than Netflix. I popped another DVD in and same thing, picture was not crisp and sharp like I was used to. Yes, these were DVD's and not Bluray but I've been watching a lot of DVD's and they usually upscale well and look decent and I don't usually find myself thinking, this looks like crap.

After the movie, we put something from Netflex back on and as long as the bandwidth kept up, the picture looked fairly crisp and considerably better than the DVD we watched. Again, source is an an Xbox 1. We did check out put and it was set for 1080P. I looked through the setting and nothing looked out of order. The old 46" was moved to the bedroom and I watched Netflix on a Samsung Bluray player that has streaming channels when hooked up to the router with an Ethernet cable. Picture looked great as always.

I went and read the reviews of the new Samsung Series 5 5190 and customers all seemed very happy, 5 stars etc. TV seems ok but am puzzled by the inability to get a crisp picture from up-scaled DVD's as I have in the past with the 8 year old. Ideas?

 

[NutBucket]

IMHO the problem is you bought a cheap TV (relative to the one you're replacing). LED is meaningless in terms of PQ unless you have a full-array with local dimming.

Another thing to consider is viewing distance. Guessing you simply replaced the TV. Well, perhaps with the larger screen you're seeing the limitations of the format. While I am a skeptic of streaming media and PQ (still a die-hard Blu-Ray fan) I would say streaming media has easily surpassed DVD in terms of PQ.

 

[riogrande]

The picture quality of steaming Netflix was pretty good if which is what leads me to believe the TV itself isn't as poor a quality as all that. If you think DVD's picture quality gets that much worse when going from 46 to 58 inches and viewed at about 10-11 feet, then I'll have to test a Bluray on it to see if that holds. In the mean time I'm going to plug a different source into it, a Samsung Bluray player instead of the Xbox 1, and see what the picture looks like.

 

[NutBucket]

I think it's just more noticeable. At 10-11 feet a lot of the detail isn't easily visible on a 46" TV. Even the 58" is a touch small for that distance. Really you want at least a 65" to see all the detail of each source. But then you'd probably start seeing limitations of the streaming sources.

 

[SithSolo1]

NutBucket is right.

Netflix still looks good because the source has always been 1080p.

The reason DVDs look worse is probably two fold:
First is that DVDs are 480p, regardless of the Xbox being set to 1080p. Lower resolution images look "better" on smaller displays at the same resolution because the pixels are more densely packed. Second is that even though the 58" set is a newer unit the scaler may be worse than the one in the older TV. They cut costs to keep the price of larger sets down and the scaler is one of the first places.

 

[riogrande]

The 58" fits our budget right now and as always, whatever you have is "never big enough".

Yep yep, I know DVD Is 400 lines. When I first tried watching a SD DVD on my 46 inch Samsung, it looked like crap. I bought a PS3 and put the same DVD into it and it looked MUCH better, apparently due to upscaling/inerpolation. In fact, I have found over the last 8 years that I don't mind watching DVD because they look pretty decent vs. the Bluray discs.

With the 8 year old Samsung, I was relying on the unit scaler to improve the DVD quality, but it was the PS3 (at the time) which did the scaling. It did a good job. The Xbox 1 seems to also do a good job. But are you saying the TV took over the unit scaling from the Xbox and is a lousy scaler? If so, can I force the TV to accept the scaling from the Xbox, or other player as it was with the old TV. If anything, that is the most plausible explanation of the issue at hand.

 

[NutBucket]

Theoretically if you feed 1080P over HDMI there shouldn't be any scaling taking place in the TV.

I still believe the issue is the bigger screen reveals more limitations in the source material.

 

[riogrande]

The source material sucks then. But I just want to make sure of where the issue lies. If the TV is basically fine, like my first one was, it was the source that needed dealing with and that fixed the problem. It definitely did when I bought the 48" Samsung 8 years ago. As mentioned, the older Panasonic Progressive scan DVD player gave a crappy picture on the 48". Switched to a PS3 and the picture was amazingly sharp with a Bluray CG movie, but quite good even with a standard DVD. The up-scale quality has always been quite good on the 46". It doesn't look as good on the 58, sure, possibly because it's pushed too far. If so, then other 1080P same sized TV's (other brands or models) won't make much difference, in theory.

 

[NutBucket]

Correct. Unless they have better scalers in the TV themselves. But, I really doubt that's a major selling point these days so if I was building TVs I wouldn't be focusing on providing a robust 480p upscaler.

 

[riogrande]

Right, so the question is, is the Xbox 1 feeding the TV a native 400 picture and the TV upscaling it - not so good then, and if so, how can I get the X box 1 to do it instead?

According to a Samsung tech support, the TV does not upscale so apparently thats not at issue. I'll do some testing to see if a difference source gives a different result.

 

[NutBucket]

Depends on the definition you use. Technically everything is upscaled because the native resolution of the panel is 1920x1080. Therefore, any input must be scaled accordingly.

I don't have an Xbox so I can't comment on what settings to use. I guess for a PS3 it is accomplished by only allowing 1080p output?

 

[riogrande]

Well, I assume if I played a 1080P Bluray disc, that wouldn't need to be up-scaled if it is playing at full 1080P.

The Xbox 1 was checked and in the settings, output was set at 1080P.

Tried to post more but forums filter says my post is spam-like content. Thats a first! Anyway, it may be that I've pushed beyond the limits of how much you can up-scale a DVD and have the picture quality remain acceptable. It would be interesting of that's what others have found too.

I can see if the Netflix source is HD, it would look better; it never looked that much better on the smaller LCD TV but maybe the size difference is at fault here and 400 lines can only be upscaled so much! The stand alone BR player did give a crisper picture than the Xbox 1, but you could see the pixels somewhat at 10 feet. Need to try a BR disc next.

 

[13Gigatons]

480 is hard to watch now unless it's a youtube video on PC.....1080p are a must for movies for now. I hate it when I'm flipping channels and see something 480i OTA, we have Charlie Rose on two channels and it's painful to even watch that at 480i, always switch to the 1080i version.

PS: The OP should judge his new TV by how well it displays 1080 content since that's what it was actually designed and built for, might as well try a VHS tape and see how bad that will look.

 

[riogrande]

Update:

I have had a chance to play Bluray discs and verified the picture looks sharp and crisp. It appears that DVD content can only be enlarged so much and still look "decent". On my 46" Samsung LCD TV, they looked decent, definitely watchable, but on the 58", the sharpness has been noticeably less. When I watched the new Ghostbusters DVD, some scenes of the characters inside rooms looked almost a bit 2Dish. It may be that some DVD's are worse than others for upscaling. I later watched The Mechanic from Redbox and it looks better than Ghostbusters - almost decent although it did lack crispness that the Blurays have.

Speaking of VHS tapes, I have played those on my 46" and of course they aren't very sharp, nor would one expect them to be - although I was able to watch them knowing the source and keeping my expectations according.

Conclusion: Judging by 1080P discs TV is a keeper.

 

[Harry_Wild]

I think you should went with a 4K TV for additional $200-$300! The TV itself will be much sharper even in a cheap 4K then a 1080p TV which is 9+ year old technology! You get what you pay for in most cases too! I have a 75" Samsung 4K and it just fabulous!