TWC and HD-Box Resolution Tip!

[Jack 1000]

Great tip I found!

On my new Samsung HD TV, in working with brand new HDMI cable, the picture is AWESOME!!! (Even on SD channels!) Users with Navigator and HDMI, in addition to setting your box to HDMI output, if your TV supports 1080 res, under the resolution settings, select that one ONLY. (Or the highest that your set allows.) If it is 720 res, go with 720. De-select all other output resolution settings. This not only forces the box to output at the highest resolution all the time, even if an SD station is only at 420. The box will THINK that it is at 1080. What this means is that the box at a 1080 output will change channels faster. (Or 720, if that is as high as your TV will go.) Don't use the Auto Select feature, force your HD box to output at your TV's highest output resolution all the time and de-select the others.

Oh, and those new cables also made my Closed Captioning work! It had not worked before on the box for 3 years!

Jack

[gparris]

Welcome to the world of HDTV.:wave:

May I ask if this set is the Samsung Plasma or LCD and what size diagonal?

[Jack 1000]

Welcome to the world of HDTV.:wave:

May I ask if this set is the Samsung Plasma or LCD and what size diagonal?

Thanks GP!!!

LCD 40"

Jack

[ddeerrff]

Not sure I understand the rational for doing this.  I can see it perhaps making channel changes faster, but....

You pay big bucks for a high end TV that has a state-of-the-art processor to crunch the numbers and make whatever input is applied fill the screen, and then you offload that function to the cheap STB?  

I would think for best picture you would want the STB to do as little messing with the signal as possible.

But then again, I'm still watching TV on a 36" SD CRT.

[TPK]

Great tip I found!

On my new Samsung HD TV, in working with brand new HDMI cable, the picture is AWESOME!!! (Even on SD channels!) Users with Navigator and HDMI, in addition to setting your box to HDMI output, if your TV supports 1080 res, under the resolution settings, select that one ONLY. (Or the highest that your set allows.) If it is 720 res, go with 720. De-select all other output resolution settings. This not only forces the box to output at the highest resolution all the time, even if an SD station is only at 420. The box will THINK that it is at 1080. What this means is that the box at a 1080 output will change channels faster. (Or 720, if that is as high as your TV will go.) Don't use the Auto Select feature, force your HD box to output at your TV's highest output resolution all the time and de-select the others.

Oh, and those new cables also made my Closed Captioning work! It had not worked before on the box for 3 years!

Jack

Unless something has changed, the cable boxes are only able to output 1080i or 720p resolution...  They are not able to output 1080p resolution, even with HDMI...

If this is still the case, I think its a bad thing to force the output to 1080i all the time, but instead the box should be set to output 1080i and 720p (based on the source resolution)...

The reason is simple..   If you force the output to 1080i, and you have a 720p source (like ESPN, Fox, ABC, etc..) then the box will take the source picture and effectively cut the frame rate in half by adding interlacing to the picture (not to mention other interlacing issues), which sort of defeats the purpose of a progressive picture as broadcast by these networks...

Now if the boxes were capable of outputing 1080p, then I would think that the box should be set up that way, since you can have the best of both (the resolution of 1080i, as well as the progressive picture of 720p)....

I think its kinda yucky to take a nice progressive picture, and purpousely interlace it...

I think interlacing should have died along with the CRT...  But I think we will always be stuck with it forever....

[Mark Strube]

Unfortunately your tip highly depends on the hardware in use. In some cases, setting your receiver to output only 1080i will look the best. I know with all the Sony HDTV's I've owned, they have a noticeably softer picture with 720p, and not in a nice progressive way. Adding interlacing to the mix isn't always a bad thing if your HDTV is capable of a good progressive scan, in which case you wouldn't be losing detail, and wouldn't be adding artifacts.

I've even experienced TV's that are 720p, that looked better when accepting a 1080i signal. You also need to keep in mind that setting the box to output 720p at all times, makes the box responsible for downscaling 1080i channels to 720p, instead of your television... just like setting it for 1080i all the time makes your box responsible for the upscaling. I've never experienced a cable box that did a decent job of downscaling 1080i signals... upscaling is a different story, and as I said above, depends on your hardware.

Your desire to help out with this tip is definitely appreciated, but unfortunately the "correct" output setting for everyone's setup is best achieved through trial and error.

[ArgMeMatey]

...

LCD 40"

...

Sorry to go slightly off topic here but ... is this the UN40B6000?  LED backlight?  If so, do you have two RF inputs?

[Jack 1000]

Sorry to go slightly off topic here but ... is this the UN40B6000?  LED backlight?  If so, do you have two RF inputs?

It's the Samsung LN40B550.  I think that there are two RF inputs, not sure though.

Jack

[popegreg]

Unfortunately your tip highly depends on the hardware in use.

Exactly!  Unless the speed of changing channels is your primary goal, rather than picture quality, you should see which piece of hardware does the better job of upconverting your 480 and 720p programming.

Try it both ways, just selecting 1080i or selecting 480p, 720p and 1080i and let your eyeballs be the judge.

In my case my Panny plasma does a much better job than the cable box.

--greg

[aaron]

When I had the TWC installers at my house recently to check out a problem I was having one of them scolded me for using passthrough and changed my box to output 1080i only, and then said, "See how much better that looks". I have a 720p TV, and the channel he had it on was 720p. I wanted to get him to run some cable for me afterwards so I didn't correct him, but I really had to bite my tongue.

[RonH]

I agree that it can be hardware dependent for quality of the end result.  However I also agree that interlacing a progressive signal in a cheap STB, and then de-interlacing it in your TV is not ideal.

I found I could tell the difference on my sony XBR1, and thus used the setting according to the channel, but now with a Kuro Plasma and a directV box, I tried hard but can't tell the difference.  So normally I even leave channels like ESPNHD on 1080i output from the box.  If I'm having people over and trying to get the "best image possible", I'll manually switch it to 720p for native 720p channels.