LCD Picture Quality - A real life case of Jekyll & Hyde?

[Dazmb]

Why why why oh why. That's what I want to know! Why is it that my new 32" Sony D3000 is so hit & miss with picture quality from DVD. It's fed progressive output from an Arcam DV78 (not too shabby...), and has been calibrated and setup correctly. I play one DVD and it's fabulous quality. I play another and it looks poor. I watch TV using digital tuner and the BBC news looks stunning on the titles and the in-studio picture, but they cut to a film from say the recent troubles in Zimbabwe and it looks woeful. I'm thinking it's the way the source film quality/format, but I can't keep adjusting my settings to suit everytime. Is this just an LCD thing you have to live with. It's spoiling things for me. All my interconnects are QED, so it's not my gear. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr................. so frustrating - come back CRT TV!

 

[Andrew Everard]

I think it's rather more a case of the screen revealing problems in the source material.

DVDs do vary in the quality of the transfer and the original prints from which they're made.

And I am sure the BBC would like to have the same picture quality for reports from Zimbabwe - where its journalists are forbidden to work and thus have to operate under covert conditions, presumably with nothing better than ordinary consumer cameras to avoid attracting attention - as it does in its state of the art news studio.

 

[Dazmb]

But what is it about LCD technology that does this?

 

[Anonymous]

Have you ever tried to use a magnifying glass, or blown up a photograph. You see the 'grain' ...the resolution of the original image. If your LCD has twice ase much potential resolution then your previous CRT or is larger then it will show up the quality of the original source more..this will make the crappy source look crappier.....it will also be able to show how great an HD source is where your CRT would not. Another way is to try and move your face closer to a CRT and decide whether the image is so great.

If you are asking about motion and colour then the answer is more complicated since LCD deal with both of these differently from a CRT.