Frobozz
02-20-2007, 03:11 PM
Hi all,
Last month I picked up a Vizio 50" Plasma HDTV, model P50HDTV10A, from Circuit City. I got it on a super bowl sale with a $150 online coupon and a $200 rebate, so the final price was under $1500.
The display looks gorgeous when displaying 720p or 1080 content. But, I'm noticing really bad jpeg-style artifacts when viewing video from the SVideo or component inputs. The source on the SVideo is an old Huges satellite TV settop box. When I used this with my Sony 32" CRT, I saw absolutely no artifacts, so I don't think it's the source. I'm seeing the same artifacts when coming in from a DVD player with component out.
I've been impressed with everything about this TV except this artifacting problem. I would think that most of the expense of the TV is in the display, not the mpeg encoding/decoding chip. A high-end encoding chip shouldn't cost more than $50 these days. So I'm amazed that Vizio would have such a nice display, but a lousy encoder.
Have any other Vizio owners out there encountered this artifacting problem, and can you recommend any way to improve image quality? I've started poking around in the manual with the encoding settings, but didn't see a noticable improvement. The other alternatives I'm considering are:
> Take all the video into my home theater PC, re-encode it there, and then pipe that into the TV through either an HDMI port (using a DVI to HDMI cable) or though the RGB PC port, at 1024x768 resolution so the TV doesn't have to upscale. I'll test this out over the next few days to see what the computer display looks like, and whether this will resolve the artifacting.
> Get a new settop box with an HDMI out. (But if it has to upscale 480i/p it may still get the artifacts even though it's a digital source.)
> Get a DVD player with it's own upscaling and use an HDMI cable. (But everything I've heard so far suggests that TVs have better upscaling chips than DVD players.)
Any advice appreciated,
-Frobozz
Last month I picked up a Vizio 50" Plasma HDTV, model P50HDTV10A, from Circuit City. I got it on a super bowl sale with a $150 online coupon and a $200 rebate, so the final price was under $1500.
The display looks gorgeous when displaying 720p or 1080 content. But, I'm noticing really bad jpeg-style artifacts when viewing video from the SVideo or component inputs. The source on the SVideo is an old Huges satellite TV settop box. When I used this with my Sony 32" CRT, I saw absolutely no artifacts, so I don't think it's the source. I'm seeing the same artifacts when coming in from a DVD player with component out.
I've been impressed with everything about this TV except this artifacting problem. I would think that most of the expense of the TV is in the display, not the mpeg encoding/decoding chip. A high-end encoding chip shouldn't cost more than $50 these days. So I'm amazed that Vizio would have such a nice display, but a lousy encoder.
Have any other Vizio owners out there encountered this artifacting problem, and can you recommend any way to improve image quality? I've started poking around in the manual with the encoding settings, but didn't see a noticable improvement. The other alternatives I'm considering are:
> Take all the video into my home theater PC, re-encode it there, and then pipe that into the TV through either an HDMI port (using a DVI to HDMI cable) or though the RGB PC port, at 1024x768 resolution so the TV doesn't have to upscale. I'll test this out over the next few days to see what the computer display looks like, and whether this will resolve the artifacting.
> Get a new settop box with an HDMI out. (But if it has to upscale 480i/p it may still get the artifacts even though it's a digital source.)
> Get a DVD player with it's own upscaling and use an HDMI cable. (But everything I've heard so far suggests that TVs have better upscaling chips than DVD players.)
Any advice appreciated,
-Frobozz
