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HD picture looks very soft.

F

fatbloke

Member
Ever since owning the foxsat-hdr the pictures been a lot sharper than the HD Freeview that's built into my TV. Over the last few days I've noticed the picture looks very much softer like someone's turned the sharpness down. When I switch to the Freeview HD picture it's now much sharper than the foxsat. Anybody else notice this or is it just me? Are they doing something to the freesat picture?
 
grahamlthompson said:
Can't say I have noticed anything. You do have the vformat setting on the Foxsat set to 1080i ?
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Actually I don't it's on 720p after a friend of mine who works in the business told me a few years ago to try 720p as it's often a lot sharper. So I tried and he was right it's much clearer. Tried 1080i yesterday to see what happened but it was worse so put it back to 720i. It does look a lot better today so maybe it was a one off. Just in case you were wondering my TV's 1080p.
 
Are you sure? Some "Full HD" TVs are actually 1376x768.

If you try to display a non-1080 source (and HiDef TV is often transmitted at 720) on a 1080 panel, something somewhere has to upscale the image pixels to match the display pixels. It is just a toss-up whether the set-top box does it better than the TV itself.
 
That might work for SD channels
Assuming your TV has 1920 x 1080 pixels it can't possibly work as you are reducing 1920 x 1080 pixels to 1280 x 720, that's bound to lose detail.
 
There never has been a broadcast source of 720p in the UK. The nearest you can get is iplayer HD which is 720p25 (not the broadcast standard 720p50)

All HD satellite channels are 1080i 1920 x 1080. The 1440 x 1080 channels were replaced with the full resolution a long time ago. Freeview-HD has some 1080p25 content though.

No Full-HD sets should have less than 1080 lines.
 
Really? Try THIS ONE.

I have not checked, but I am given to understand that Freeview is commonly 720, not sure about i or p. I didn't know FreesatHD is only 1080.
 
720p50 has never been broadcast in the UK on any platform. I cannot understand how throwing away 1152000 pixels and then getting a TV to re-invent the real data discarded can possibly improve the picture. A bit like saying 576i will look better than 1080i on a Full HD TV.
 
Black Hole said:
Are you sure? Some "Full HD" TVs are actually 1376x768.

If you try to display a non-1080 source (and HiDef TV is often transmitted at 720) on a 1080 panel, something somewhere has to upscale the image pixels to match the display pixels. It is just a toss-up whether the set-top box does it better than the TV itself.
Click to expand...
New
Yes it's 1080p and yes that's exactly what I was told it depends on the tv. It makes no difference with my Sony 40" so it's set at 1080i, but my Samsung 40" is much sharper on 720p. When my sister had Sky tv installed the guy showed her the different settings as he said it differs from tv to tv. Her picture was also clearer on 720p so he left it on that. She also has a Samsung so it's obviously down to the tv.​
 
grahamlthompson said:
That might work for SD channels
Assuming your TV has 1920 x 1080 pixels it can't possibly work as you are reducing 1920 x 1080 pixels to 1280 x 720, that's bound to lose detail.
Click to expand...
The tv has to upscale it's still using 1920 x 1080 pixels but it makes a better job of it than the Humax set at 1080i
 
There is no rescaling required to send a 1920 x 1080 picture to a 1920 x 1080 display.

All current HD transmissions have 1920 x 1080 pixels.

Source and destination have a 1:1 pixel ratio. What you are doing is taking a 1920 x 1080 source, rescaling it to 1280 x 720 which discards video information. You then send it to the TV which has to invent the video data you have just thrown away. This makes no sense at all.

As I already said if you start off with a SD programme say a BBC one with 720 x 576 pixels, then you may well get a better picture by sending the original 576i content to the TV and letting the TV scaler produce the required 1920 x 1080 pixels. This will work if the TV has a better scaler than the box. The downside is that the epg and menu overlays will not be in HD and look decidedly fuzzy.

What you are doing though starting with a 576i source is getting the box to scale to 1280 x 720 and then the TV to 1920 x 1080. This will also slightly degrade the epg etc.
 
Oops! Big mistake. I have the EH5000 and I got confused (and the 5000 is 1920x1080).

As far as I am concerned, "HD Ready" only means it lacks a DVB-T2 tuner. Any screen that can handle at least 720 is HiDef (and regardless of comments above, the original HiDef transmissions on Freeview were 720).
 
grahamlthompson said:
There is no rescaling required to send a 1920 x 1080 picture to a 1920 x 1080 display.

All current HD transmissions have 1920 x 1080 pixels.

Source and destination have a 1:1 pixel ratio. What you are doing is taking a 1920 x 1080 source, rescaling it to 1280 x 720 which discards video information. You then send it to the TV which has to invent the video data you have just thrown away. This makes no sense at all.

As I already said if you start off with a SD programme say a BBC one with 720 x 576 pixels, then you may well get a better picture by sending the original 576i content to the TV and letting the TV scaler produce the required 1920 x 1080 pixels. This will work if the TV has a better scaler than the box. The downside is that the epg and menu overlays will not be in HD and look decidedly fuzzy.

What you are doing though starting with a 576i source is getting the box to scale to 1280 x 720 and then the TV to 1920 x 1080. This will also slightly degrade the epg etc.
Click to expand...
Do you know the difference between 1080p and 1080i or more to the point 720p and 1080i. Do you know what the i stands for or what it does. The 1080i picture using the foxat and tv together make the picture on the Samsung a lot sharper than having the foxsat set to 1080i it's as simple as that. It's obvious your having trouble making sense of this but it's a fact. Maybe me my family and friends are all imagining it! You should stop telling everyone this is not possible and try and find out why it is. Maybe you should come round and have a look then when you see it with your own eyes go away and try and work it out. Sorry if you don't like it but it's much clearer when set to 720p so stop telling me it can't be.
 
They have always been 1080i. Originally in 1080i anamorphic format (1440 x 1080). The experimental BBC-HD satellite transmissions were also 1080i anamorphic at a very high bitrate (the picture quality was superb). More recently advances in H264/AVC encoders have allowed square pixel 1080i (1920 x 1080) at much lower bitrates. I am not saying a 768 line display isn't any good. Far from it, a quality 768 line TV will have superior pictures to a poor 1080 line one like the cheap ones the supermarkets sell (Mostly rebadged Vestels from Turkey).

The best TV I ever saw was a 768 line Pioneer Kuro Plasma.

All this is irrelevant to starting off with 1920 x 1080 pixels, downgrading to 1280 x 720 pixels and then going back to 1920 x1080 pixels in the TV.

The original HD Ready logo guarantees

A minimum vertical resolution of 720 lines
A HDCP digital video input either DVI or HDMI
The capability to display 720p50 (1280 x 720 progressively delivered at 50 frames/second and 1080i (1440 x 1080 or 1920 x 1080 interlaced in two 1/50 second fields e 25 frame/second). The two standards have broadly similar performance depending on source content. The doubled framerate of 720p50 compensating for the lower rsolution compared to 1080i
 
Of course I know the difference, you clearly do not

Interlacing versus progressive has nothing to do with picture resolution.

1080i sends 1920 x 1080 pixels in two chunks known as fields. In the UK this consists of lines 1 3 5 etc (odd lines - upper field first), followed by the even lines 2 4 6 8 etc.). Each field is transmitted in 1/50 second. In 1/25 second you have a full frame of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The TV will produce this frame in a process known as de-interlacing. All HD broadcasts in the UK now use this system apart from some Freeview-HD content (more later). There may be a 1/50 second between the generated data for each field, this gives the slight jagged edge unless the two fields are derived from the same image as they would be from a movie created from the original film stock. This creates an identical image to 1080p25.

108op25 simply sends the data progressively line 1 2 3 etc. The whole frame takes 1/25 second.

You are expressing a misunderstood myth perpetuating the Sky installers dodgy advice (They aren't Engineeers simply tradesmen taught how to install a satellite dish a task that's not very difficult).

When 1080ps is bandied about they mean 1080p50 which has the full resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and the 50 frames/second of 720p50. There aren't any 1080p50 broadcast sources. Many HD Video Camcorders/Digital Cameras and DSLRS can shoot in 1080p50 format (I have 3 such devices).

Deleting a load of video data and then guessing what was deleted is ridiculous.
 
My TV is showing Midsomer Murders at the moment in 1080p. Some adverts report the same.
 
What platform - Satellite or Freeview.?

As already said Freeview HD has 1080p25 content. If it's your HD FOX T2 do you have the output scaler set to de-interlace (1080p). If so your TV will report 1080p because that's what it's getting.

Recording a bit to see what the actual broadcast is.
 
It's easy to find out what the actual broadcast is on HD/HDR-FOX - press "i" and it is shown on the right of the I-plate.
 
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