23" LCD TV & Sky+ with Iscan Pro?

[OKI]

Hi there. I'm new to the forum - I know this is a little long winded and probably really obvious but I have trawled the Internet trying to get an answer to this, but I can't seem to find it. I really hope someone can can help.

I have just bought a 23" LCD TV (LG L2323T from eBuyer at £599 incl. VAT: http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...59660&_LOC=UK).

It's a little old but looks great and has really good spec for the price and is "HDTV ready" (sort of). The response time of 25ms isn't brilliant, but I thought the design, price etc and not having a TV with a hugh CRT outweighted a little ghosting.

Anyway, I plugged in the Sky+ box through the OEM scart cable and the picture was rubbish, RGB or not. I then tried a high quality s-VHS cable and it was much better. Unfortunately though, I still have a quite nasty picture with loads of jaggies. There is no shimering or blurred image, it just looks really low res. I understand I will get this because its a fairly low quality MPEG2 feed from the dish (even with high signal strength and quality), but the Sky on-sreen-graphics (e.g. programme guide and services etc) look really "chunky". I assume however, that these are native to the box and therefore should be crisp. I tried adjusting all the settings on the TV (such as sharpness etc) and Sky box (screen sizes etc) but not nothing made a huge improvement. I have also had the Sky box running through my old CRT, and the picture is 10 times better.

As this was the first thing I tested, I thought I had bought a rubbish telly - so I tried the other inputs. I plugged in my PC through the HD15 - and it looks pretty good, then the Mac mini through DVI, which was breath-takingly good.

I'm no "videophile" (if that's the right word!), but I just want a half decent TV picture - and it is noticeably bad. Even my girlfriend who claims, "as long as I can watch Eastenders on it, I don't care" thinks it's a bit cr*p.

I don't think I am missing something really obvious here. I have looked around on the Internet and think a progressive scanner would really help (like the Iscan Pro?), as the TV accepts HDTV (720p/1080i) Component Video. Would this make any difference, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Sorry to ramble on - I wanted to cover my whole setup! I would really appreciate it if anyone has any ideas?

Thanks so much in advance,

Mike

[KraGorn]

Hi,

You seem to have a good idea why you're getting the relatively poor PQ you're seeing. I presume the PC and Mac were highre resolution that normal PAL, hence they looked better. Clearly the TV's internal scaler/deinterlacer is not great if you're seeing jaggies and bad pixellation.

A relatively cheap scaler like an older iScan or Lumgen Vision would possibly be your best bet, to some extent it depends on the native resolution of the TV and whether it will accept that .. and indeed whether the scaler can supply it. Custom resolutions are availabel with more expensive devices, but the lower-end ones tend to support only the standard SD and HD, which nonetheless would be a large improvement over what you have at present.

[OKI]

Thanks so much for your thoughts, KraGorn. I'm glad I'm in the right area.

I have just picked up an iScan Pro for £75 on eBay, so I haven't broken the bank even if it doesn't work.

I'll post my findings...

Thanks again,

Mike

[KraGorn]

That's a pretty good price, you should certainly see some improvement.

[OKI]

Hello again!

I hooked up the iScan Pro with the Sky+ box and connected it to the TV's VGA socket and got an error message - "Out of range", so I tried every different combintion of switches, but nothing worked.

I didn't know if this was because of the input, so I tried a DVD player using S-VHS, and again, I got the same message.

So next, I tried the same procedure on my 17" Sony SDM-X72 monitor, but again I got an Out of Range error message. I don't think there's a problem with the iScan, it looks to be in great condition, and auto-switches signal etc.

Do you have any ideas? I'll get an HD-15 to component cable and try it through the HDTV component input on the TV, although the iScan Pro outputs to 480p/576p, and the component on the TV says 720p/1080i (altough maunal says 480p/720p/1080i).

Do you think this just produce a messed up signal?

Thanks for all your help...

Mike