I need a little help...

[kellen34]

I just bought a SONY 60" SXRD XBR2 about two weeks ago. Picture in HD looks great, but the SD picture is not that clear. I was wonder if anyone could steer me in the right direction.

I've got an HR20-700 hooked up to it through the HDMI cable. I've tried the regular cables and it doesn't seem to make a difference. Is there something I'm missing? Settings on the receiver are set to what they should be.

[Earl Bonovich]

You are not missing anything...

The SD picture is optimized for a 32" CRT TV...
When you take that image... and stretch it out to 60".... you are going to see just about every compression artifact/flaw in the picture.

There is not much you can do about it.

The only recommendation is to not watch it in Stretch mode (As that just makes it worse).

[Michael D'Angelo]

I just bought a SONY 60" SXRD XBR2 about two weeks ago. Picture in HD looks great, but the SD picture is not that clear. I was wonder if anyone could steer me in the right direction.

I've got an HR20-700 hooked up to it through the HDMI cable. I've tried the regular cables and it doesn't seem to make a difference. Is there something I'm missing? Settings on the receiver are set to what they should be.

I actually got the same TV about 3 weeks ago and it is hooked up to a HR20 with HDMI connection also.

Like you said HD looks great. But my SD looks very good. It seems to get getting better more I use the TV.

How many hours have you put on the TV so far?

What format do you have the TV set to?

Do you have the HR20 set to native on or off?

What resolutions are you using?

What format do you have the HR20 set to?

[chicagojim]

I have a 60" Sony as well and it is just part of the game when you own a large format television.

One bit of advice that I can give you though:

Don't "torch" the picture on the TV. Meaning, don't have the brightness and contrast jacked way up. TV dealers love to crank this in the showroom, and the installers usually follow suit. If you have a THX DIsney DVD like Toy Story, you can run an optimizing program on it that is included for free. My settings are around 50-60% on the brightness and contrast. Takes some getting used to, but the overall picture quality in SD and HD is better. It also reduces the artifacting appearance.

Hope this helps!

[Stuart Sweet]

I don't know if you're ever really going to be happy with an SD picture on a 60" TV, that's kind of why HD was invented.

[ddeen]

Like Mike said, check your HD Setup. That Sony should have a good internal scaler so try setting Native = On. And then select all the resolutions 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i. That way all resolutions will be sent to your Sony unscaled. If that looks better leave it. If it doesn't look any different then unselect 480i, 480p, and let the HR20 scale those resolutions. Pick which ever one looks the best to you. Remember you have picture modes on both the HR20 and your Sony so make sure you are viewing in an unenhanced full or cinema mode on both. Stretch, wide, Crop will make the picture look worse.

[Ken S]

Basically, whenever you're faced with SD you need to roll through all the options to see what's best. All the options meaning all the Res options on the HR20 and the Normal, Wide, Stretch, etc. on the Sony. Most times you can come up with something reasonable.

Be careful though sometimes the HR20 will get a nasty bug in crop mode which stretches the picture out vertically. Sometimes changing channels fixes this...sometimes not.

[kellen34]

Hey, thanks to all. Tweaked it a little. Not much better, but as Earl said, it's kind of the nature of the beast with a TV this large. Just waiting for more HD channels to come out!

John