Directv ordeal, terrible picture on my HDTV

[suninmoon]

I'll try to keep this long story short but it requires some back story. I initially tried to sign up with DirecTV through circuit city who sent an installer out to my house. He took a look around for about 15 minutes and left saying it was impossible to install. I wasn't prepared to give up that easy so I called a local guy out who did a little more investigating and found a perfect spot in my back yard with no trees.

I took the Circuit City stuff back and decided to go with this guy and get the almost the same DirecTV deal. He turned out to be a great installer but a flakey business man. I eventually went through the dealer he buys his stuff from and explained my ordeal. He was out the next day and hooked me up no problem. He did a great job and even ran completely new coaxial through my house because he said the stuff I had was old and outdated. He setup DirecTV on the three TV's in my house and all was working well.

I was a little worried about the reception I was getting on my 34" Sony 16x9 HDTV but he said that was just a preview channel and they didn't put much money in it. I decided to upgrade to a better Hughes receiver for my HDTV to use component cables but the other TV's, a 27" Sony Analog TV and a small 14" Samsung in my bedroom use the basic Hughes free receiver that comes with the deal. The analog Sony is using an S Video connection and the little Samsung is using coaxial, it does not have even composite connections.

The reception on my analog 27" Sony and my little Samsung look absolutely perfect. The picture quality on my Sony 34" 16x9 HDTV looked almost unwatchable. Badly pixilated, blurry, and soft. Some of it may be due to fact that I use the wide zoom on my TV to stretch the 4:3 picture to fit my 16x9 screen, but it shouldn't look as bad as it does. I stretched the analog cable that I had before and it didn't look that bad. Even when I don’t stretch it and view the image with the black bars on the left and right it still looks like crap.

I called direct TV and they said it may be because my TV is HD and I'm using an analog box. Like my TV may be trying to up convert the picture and it doesn't like it. She said I needed to get a DirecTV HD STB or force my TV to go to 480i. My TV switches resolution automatically so that’s not an option.

I decided to take matters into my own hands and went to Circuit City and bought a Samsung HD receiver. A Samsung SIRTS360 to be exact. I hooked it up using the DVI port in my TV and the picture quality greatly improved. Still not great but it is an improvement. I see less pixilation and the picture is not as blurry. Some channels, like local ones still look horrible.

Does anyone know if this is this my solution? Does it make sense that an HD receiver would improve the picture quality of DirecTV even though I'm not getting HD broadcast through Direct TV?

I thought about getting that new Hughes HNS HTLHD receiver because I heard it’s better than the Samsung and I like the Hughes channel guide and remote. Then again Sony makes their own version of the Hughes receiver made by LG and its called Sony SAT-HD300. I thought it might work better with my TV if I have a Sony receiver.

I also heard stuff on this forum about DirecTV picture quality getting worse with more compression. I hope I didn’t make a mistake getting DirecTV. Cable sucks really bad and I want to get rid of it. I almost signed up with voom but the channel lineup wasn’t there.

Anyone have any advice or ideas?

The model of my Sony TV is Sony KV34XBR910. It’s supposed to be one of the best HDTV’s made, but that may not mean much when viewing analog or non HD. I bought it mainly to watch DVD’s on and excels at that, but getting DirecTV to look good through it would be nice also.

[bonscott87]

Nothing you can do. SD material often looks crappy the bigger screen you have. Facts of life. The bigger screen will show all the imperfections in the SD signal and the bigger the screen, the worse it can become.

But there are some things you can do.
1) CALIBRATE your HDTV! This will make a HUGE difference. Get Avia or Video Essentials and calibrate. Until you get one of these, turn your sharpness as far down as you can get. This alone will help a ton. "Sharpness" does nothing but make things look blocky on the big screen. Also turn contrast and brightness way down. Factory defaults are usually in "torch mode" which not only makes things look bad, it's also very bad for your TV and can cause quick burn in.
2) Let your HD box upconvert and see what that does. I have an old Huges E-86 HD receiver and it upconverts all signals, HD or not, up to 1080i. My 43" Hitachi then just shows that in native 1080i and doesn't do any coversion.
3) Don't sit too close. Too many people sit way to close to their big screens. Find out the optimal viewing distance. For my 43", about 9-10 feet is optimal. I could get my seating area any farther back then that so I didn't get a bigger screen. For your 34" I'd guess optimal is probably 6-8 feet. In general, farther back you sit, better the SD signal looks.
4) The above should improve things but in the end it could be your HDTV itself. Some models are better at showing SD then others. One of the main reasons I got the Hitachi was because they were known to look pretty good with SD material. Toshiba is another one that is great with SD stuff.

And it won't matter what service you have: Voom, DirecTV, Dish, or cable, SD will in general look not so great.

Good luck!

[boba]

How many times have you posted this I have seen it at least three times today and I swear I responded to it yesterday?

[suninmoon]

How many times have you posted this I have seen it at least three times today and I swear I responded to it yesterday?

I posted it in two different places on dbstalk and satelliteguys.

I want to get as much info as I can on it. After talking to DirecTV, the people on here, and an ISF tech that is going to calibrate my TV I have learned a few things.

The TV is probably trying to upconvert the 480i signal to 480p and that is messing with the picture. That is what DirecTV said.

The ISF tech just said the TV is magnifying the flaws in the picture and in trying to improve the picture it's just making a bad picture worse. He recommened getting HD of course. HD looks awesome on the TV. He also said to use an S-video connection. I may still get an HD STB because I want control over the resolution switching. The tech said the TV I have is his favorite to calibrate. He said he can tweak the heck out the thing.