32fx66 arrives!

Just back from a rather bizarre Murder Mystery night for a friend's birthday and decided to watch a bit of TV on my new 32fx66. Even better CD:UK was on! Now who can complain about a bit of Sarah Whatmore at 2 in the morning?!

Anyway, back to the TV! It arrived on Friday afternoon from John Lewis (faultless service by the way!), but have to admit that I wasn't completely impressed by the picture quality.

Admittedly I'm a complete AV amateur and this is the first "proper" TV that I have owned but still think that the picture through Sky isn't so great, lots of blockyness, if you know what I mean. I'm guessing this is probably due to the cheapness of my Scart leads (any recommendations on a good set?) although the picture through my DVD is great!! Watched X-Men on DVD last night, brilliant! Great film anyway, but so much better on a big TV.

Anyway, seeing as there seem to be a lot of people buying/asking about the 32fx66 at the moment, just thought I'd give my 2 cents worth as a beginner to the topic. It's a great TV looks wise and compared to what I was used to the picture is good, maybe not quite what I was expecting but perhaps that's the scart lead issue like I said.

In terms of John Lewis, really can't fault them. Got them to Pricematch with Electrocentre for 899, and then it was delivered within 2weeks of ordering. They could only give me a six hour delivery slot (3 until 9 on Fri afternoon) so I had to take Fri afternoon off from work but two delivery blokes turned up at 5 which was good and didn't need to help carry the thing in! Which is good because this TV is a beast! At the moment it's still on the floor because my flat mate hasn't yet come back to help me lift it onto the stand!

Overall, definately happy with my purchase (assuming a good set of scart leads improves the Sky picture) and would recommend this TV to anyone else.

Oh, and as for the whole "buzzing" issue, I'm actually quite scared to try and listen out for it! It seems like the kind of thing that I would never have noticed if it weren't for this forum! Haven't really noticed anything yet, so fingers crossed there isn't a problem with my set....

Originally posted by jamez
think that the picture through Sky isn't so great, lots of blockyness, if you know what I mean.

'Blockiness' will be caused by Sky using too much compression, not your TV or your scart leads, although you will definitely get a clearer more defined image on all sources by changing your scart leads, if you're using cheap and cheerful ones (still won't rid the blockiness though - see Sky for that one )

[neilybealy]

interesting to read your views as i'm getting mine delivered on thursday

[Rookies]

To help this blockness you better setting up a personal setting for colour etc and have the sharpness level as low as you can.

[fraggle]

Originally posted by Rookies
To help this blockness you better setting up a personal setting for colour etc and have the sharpness level as low as you can.

Rookies is 100% correct on this.

Reduce contrast and sharpness (maybe not to zero, but until the picture becomes easily watchable) and use that setting when you watch Sky.

Also remember that each Sky channel is compressed to a different level depending on how much Sky is paid, or how popular the channel is.

Things like Eurosport have a low compression and a good picture, whereas things like Game Network will be highly compresses and show a bad picture.

And bad/cheap TVs will not show enough detail so you don't notice a poor source as much.

I too got myself a FX66 about three weeks ago. I had a few teething problems to begin with. I would definitely say set up your own personal settings for contrast, brightness and colour.

I think the best way of doing this is to first turn the colour right down and then set the contrast for peak white's and the brightness for the correct black level. The two are slightly interdependent on each other so you might have to readjust one after the other. Once you are happy with the black and white picture you can then increase the colour until you have flesh tones at the correct level. Write done the positions when you are happy with them just in case you're tempted to do more adjustments as it's easy to mess up again.

I have ended up with contrast at about 40%, brightness at 55% and colour at 35%. For a while I had my brightness one notch down from this present level but concluded that I was missing some detail in dark parts of the scene.

I was originally using the scart leads that came with my DTTV box but was getting some flare on highly saturated colours so changed to a QED AV21. I was so impressed with the improvement with this lead that I got a RGB only QED AV41 to go between my DVD player and TV. Definitely use RGB feeds if you can.

I now have a really good picture which can look three dimensional on some programme material. I would highly recommend this set if your're prepared to spend a little time with set up. One other tip which I have learnt from my hifi system is to clean the pins of your mains plug with some duraglit, don't forget to wipe it off with a clean cloth. It's free too.

[ryanos]

I had a 20 quid Philips scart lead which fell too bits after two weeks so I dashed out one friday night to Com*t and picked up a Monster video2 Scart to Scart lead it cost me 40 quid but what a find .......it improved the already excellent picture on my 32fx66 by 100% stunning

I would highly reccomend this lead

As for the setting on this set as all the guys above have said set up your own setting it took me over 6 weeks to stop experimenting with various settings, I now have not touched any settings for a least a month and this set is the Pigs T*ts

[Mark Spanner]

Originally posted by jamez
Oh, and as for the whole "buzzing" issue, I'm actually quite scared to try and listen out for it! It seems like the kind of thing that I would never have noticed if it weren't for this forum! Haven't really noticed anything yet, so fingers crossed there isn't a problem with my set....

If you had the problem you almost definetly would have noticed it straight out of the box!