Hi, I have had my sony 28ls36 for a few weeks now, and although I am generally happy with it, I have a few picture quality issues. The picture through dvd (rgb) is great, but the problem I have is with watching sky digital through rgb. The picture appears blocky/pixelly, this is particullarly noticible on backgrounds (especially greys for some reason) and sometimes around text (white on dark background). Is this a problems with the tv or with skys poorer feeds? If it is the tv then would altering things like sharpness make any difference? If it is the sky, since I have an 7 year old amstrad box, would upgrading the box improve things? I am also using ixos leads. Thanks for your time, Jason
Hi, The problems you describe are almost certainly down to the sky box. If the tv was the source of the problem, then it would likely be caused by digital picture processing, such as 100hz, but as your tv is a 50hz model that lacks any digital picture processing then the tv can be ruled out as the cause. Are you watching Sky digital or analogue (is sky analogue still around)? The blockiness sounds very much like low quality digital broadcasting, but if you're box is seven years old then it must be analogue, as digital broadcasts from Sky only started in late 1998. One more thing to check, as far as I'm aware your tv has two scart sockets, one RGB and one s-video capable. The only way you can watch RGB Sky broadcasts is if you have a second scart socket on you dvd player and you have looped your satelite receiver through the dvd players second scart. If you have Sky set to RGB, but it's connected to an s-video scart socket, then you're probably watching composite video, which would result in picture degradation. One way to check is to plug sky into the scart which you currently have your dvd player connected to, and see if any of the problems are still present.
Hi Bob, Thanks for the reply. I must have my years wrong since it is definately Sky Digital and not analogue. The box we have is still old being one of the original amstrad ones (drx100?). As far as the tv only having one rgb scart socket I am using a Btec scart switch box. Maybe it just me being picky with the new tv, since this is my first widescreen set (the previous one being a sony 4:3), the previous sony picture is much softer than the new one (due to old age) so it probably hid many of sky's broadcasting problems. Is it worth replacing the amstrad box for a newer one, would this improve picture quality or just give me speedier epg etc? Cheers, Jason
Hi Jason, I'm not really sure if replacing your digibox will improve your pictures, as my experience of digital receivers is pretty limited. I would jump to the forum that deals with Sky+, Freeview etc. and ask on there if poor digtal pictures can be improved by updating the receiver, but from my own limited experience I would say that to some degree pixelation is normal because of the low bitrate allocated to many digital channels, although I seldomly have this problem on the main channels which tend to be very good when watched through the Sky box. Cheers.