Settings or bad unit?

[Kaos]

So, I just got a AQUOS 45" and am anxiously awaiting my cable Co's rolloout of HDTV later this month. In the meantime, regular TV and also DVDs look like crap. It's most noticeable on skin tone, where the best description I can give of what I'm seeing is when you take down a computer's graphics settings from "millions" of colors to something much less than that.

I'm hoping that this is an issue with some of the settings, and not how the thing is going to display DVDs. I'm running a Toshiba SD-5970 with the HDMI hookup and watched Troy last night. It was painful during the sunlight scenes with any closeups. None of the settings I tried tweaking fixed this.

Please offer any advice you think may help with this, or if this sounds like a bad set that I need to return (ugh!)

Thanks!

James

[57U]

See the FAQs on "Poor SD PQ" and "What you need to do to your new HDTV".

[Splicer]

What I am adding to this is probably nothing but I have a portable DVD player with a LCD screen (I know, no comparison) and I noticed what I consider to be what you described to a degree. Also, though much, much more rarely, I have seen this on my PC 17" LCD monitor a couple times. With both screens, neither really showed any pattern of exhibiting the problem, it was just a random thing.

The way you describe millions of colors being much much less, is the way I was trying to find to describe it myself. But it seems instead of those millions of colors, it was one pretty unified tan color (when regarding the skin-tone, which is the ONLY time I have noticed it, no other colors seem to do it as noticeably if at all), almost cartoonish like.

The reason for this posting is, I wonder if this is something that is inherint to LCD screens and is the nature of the beast, or is there some way to fix it, or is what I have described and what Kaos has described, two different things?

Ah, the mysteries of the universe being answered one question at a time...

[Kaos]

I've read the FAQs on this site and I understand that an HDTV does not make DVDs HDTV quality. My real concern is that the picture with DVDs seems worse than when I play the same movie on my Apple 23" display. However, it's really only on skin that I notice it, especially face shots.

Now, the Apple has problems with the screen "falling behind" the movie every once in awhile, so this large update washes over it which is totally annoying. And on the upside for the Sharp, I don't see any ghosting at all - something I was concerned about. But there are a couple films I've sampled with a lot of face closeups that are just annoying to watch with the Aquos.

[tonelocdog]

Also, sharp has a high resolution on their tv's. Something like 1366 by 766. For example, i connected my xbox to my sharp aquos, and the graphics look very pixelated, because i figured that sharp sustains such hight resolutions on theri flat panel monitor displays, the graphics of an xbox can't handle these type or resoulutions, because they are not up to par to em. Thats why i don't relly like rplcd tvs, because playing videogames on them adds more pixels to the game, along with the millions of pixels on a lcd display, The picutre gets to cluttered with pixels, and makes the graphics look like crap. Thats the majority of gamers have a crt display, so they don't have to deal with that problem, unless you have a good graphics card, and you can match the resolution to the graphics card, to the resoultion of a pc game.

[Matt27]

That's one of the reasons why i don't like LCD, too pixelated for me since i'm a gamer, and the black levels i could'nt stand.Especially if you play at night.

Not to mention getting dead pixels, i bought a samsung brand new and it had 2 dead pixels 1 in the middle and when in the far right corner of the screen.

[tonelocdog]

Yes, and if your stuck with dead pixels, you can't get rid of them, also its a nuisance to stare at them, while watching tv, or playing video games.

[jig]

Hi James,

My lab recently bought a Sharp Aquos 45" (LC-45GD6U) and as soon as we turn it on, we experienced the same problem as yours, bad (flush out or 'flat') skin tone colors, etc. We tried to tweak it, play with color setting, etc. but little improves.

Have you try to return the unit? Fix/tweak it? Call Sharp for repair?

Thanks in advance!

Javier