Please help and explain the picture quality issue

CotswoldsRetreat

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Hi

Brief background: bought a LG 65" CS model 3 weeks ago. Previously had a 12 year old Toshiba Regza LCD. Don't have a games console and don't have any cable or satellite connections. Got a TV aerial on the chimney that comes into the loft with a 6 port signal booster to support sockets in various rooms but generally only ever have one TV on at any one time. Coax lead from socket on wall to Panasonic HD recorder and then a lead to the TV aeriel in port.

I just can't get consistent quality picture across channels. As the TV is very modern compared to what I am used to I dins myself trying various settings without really knowing what I am doing other than checking the picture afterwards. I have settled on using the Expert Dark room mode which seems to offer the best picture for most situations.

But just watching the footie on ITV HD now (Channel 103) if the camera is on just one of the pundits talking or goes up close to a footballer on the pitch then the picture quality if awesome. But if we then move to a camera where we see all 4 pundits on screen then their faces look more pixelated. The crowd in the stadium can look very odd - almost cartoonish without any detail. watching the England footie now the close up images on players is great but on wider shots players look pixelated and the details of the crowd is not what I would have expected. The TV adverts look great :)
Some programs can look very good on BBC HD like Countryfile or BBC News on HD channel.

I watched the football last night on BBC iPlayer on UHD and it was awesome so I know the TV can display good images under certain applications.

I am also very disappointed with the quality of Standard Definition and had had expected better upscaling. Watching BBC News on Channel 231 is poor - just like watching it on my old TV and thought upscaling would make it less grainy. But I have nothing to compare it against and don't know if I am expecting too much.

Are all TV ariels the same? Am I suffering from the way I receive signals? Why is upscaling so poor (or I am expecting too much?)? I've got a setup that's about as simple as you can get it without cable or satellite etc. All the tweaking I do with various advanced settings do nothing to improve image quality to any degree.
 
Further to my post I am just viewing the women's football on BBC and it isn't great.

Channel 1 Standard Definition is very poor image quality. Channel 101 High Definition better but image quality just not sharp. Players are slightly fuzzy and it's as if there is a halo of pixelation around each player (as if the players are sprites on old 8 bit computer games).

I really expected better from this TV in terms of its capabilities to render High Definition to a high quality.

We watched Graham Norton last night on the HD channel and it was fine so it's the inconsistency of image quality between programmes that I just don't understand.

I've toyed around with the various advanced settings and without exception every tweak I do to clarity settings makes the image worse - nothing seems to improve the image in any way.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.
 
I suspect your expectations are too high for SD TV.

SD can be 544x576 or 720x576 and your stretching this out to 65" 3840x2160 the oled panels resolution, this is a huge stretch and there are limits to what you can do, the detail just isn't there.

The freeview forum may know why its so inconsistent in HD as well, possibly still using SD material broadcast in HD for example and there is a thread of freesat vs freeview. The bitrate on Freesat is a bit higher and may make a difference to you but it's hard to say and it may not.

For optimal quality you want to feed this display 4K material and it does a good job upscaling 1080p but just because something says its 1080p doesn't necessarily mean it's quality unless its say a Blu-ray or a more modern internet video stream encoded with a better compression codec than what broadcast TV uses.

LG do offer there own AI upscaler in their menu it must be turned on but I couldn't see it making any difference. You could mess around with the clarity menu section and see what works for you, default sharpness is 0 and pushing that too high can cause visual problems.
 
To next010:

Many thanks for your reply. You make a good point about the resolution issue and it being a huge stretch to expect it to scale without issues.

It is the inconsistency I really don't understand. Some programs can look great and other not so much, and even within the same program some images are better than other depending on what is being broadcast.
 
I'd consider getting a simple satellite dish installed for just the free to air channels on freesat, the TV has a built in DVB-S2 tuner so you dont need an external box, it's a low cost gamble to see if it looks better.

Also you dont need external recorder the TV can record to a USB storage device, I'd also try without the panasonic recorder in the loop just in case its somehow makes a difference.
 
Thanks for your further reply next010.

I'll have a look at the freesat option. I could put it in the loft and connect it through to the TV direct.

I'll also take a look at taking the recorder out of the equation too :)
 
even within the same program some images are better than other depending on what is being broadcast.

Funny, that's exactly the problem I had with my Panasonic 55FZ950. In the end I came to the conclusion that it was just a result of the image sharpening algorithm that Panasonic uses. Basically the bit of processing controlled by the "Sharpness" control in the TV menu. Seems to only look at high contrast edges and sharpens only those pixels. Whereas pixels with low to medium inter-pixel contrast, such as the facial details of a talking head at a far distance from the camera, are below the threshold and are effectively the same as setting sharpness to 0 for those pixels. On the Panasonic I could even set the Sharpness control to maximum and faces still looked blurry at a distance (with max sharpness they should look very oversharpened and "ringy"). I also had this problem with Panasonic Plasma V20 model from ages ago. I think they do it because if you only sharpen edges it doesn't cause so much MPEG type compression artefacts to get sharpened, so it saves having to do an extra pass of MPEG noise reduction processing (not that I like that smoothed look).

I'm still using a Samsung 768p plasma in 2022 and it looks great in terms of sharpness on everything but the skin tones suck on darker tones and it uses too much electricity (I have to run it on power saving mode all the time now cause of the electricity prices, and that makes the skin tones even worse). I have the 55CS LG in ebay cart ready to purchase but I know I'll be disappointed.
 
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