Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater love/hate relationship with football and my DLP

I have the Samsung 50" DLP T.V. It's not even 2 months old. Football is what justified my investment. I love this T.V. on DVD's and sat. movies, and sat H.D. is absolutly awesome. When it comes to a non H.D. game, the picture is of almost poor quality. Yet H.D. is as close to perfect as you could get. Why such a huge difference on football only. Everybody that watches this set agrees. About half the sunday ticket is H.D. and I have an off-air antenea for locals, but non-H.D. games are not far from terrible. People actully ask before coming over! I've played with it relentlosly, settings etc. I have tried s-video, componant, and finally DVI. Why is this problem only exclusive to football????????

Dunno Jon. I have the HLN4365W. I watch most standard def on s-video. I find the standard definition picture on my set varies for no apparent reason. Most of the time it's pretty good. Last Saturday night I watched the Ohio State/Northwestern game on ESPN2, and the picture stunk?/stank?/stinked?........it was ugly! I switched around to a few other stations including another game, and they all were ugly. My thought on the games was that the stadium lighting was not up to snuff and was causing problems, but that's a stretch. In fact, over that weekend, even Hi Def was not so hot. I have no idea why that was. Maybe my cable company (Cox) was doing some tweaking. Monday night football in Hi Def was sparkling. WOW! This technology is still in its infancy, and the companies are still figuring out how to set it up properly, and are still dealing with problems.

I'm assuming you have one of the satellite companies. You might contact them, and ask your question. I suspect, the problem is with them rather than your set.

Actually, it's most likely the video server. The CHUM stations here tried to go to DDR video servers, someone told them these MPeG servers were the way to go, no tape, 18,000 hours on a floppy disk, all the marketing claims.

Problem was, the compression stunk. Looked like a Chinese bootleg Video CD.

One of those marketing things... ahh, video is video, who's going to care? The people that pay $10,000 for a television then get VHS quality broadcasts.

The FCC and CRTC really have to start cracking down on this stuff.

Bren R.

If we get the CRTC involved, my guess is things would only get worse and my taxes would go up!

Very similar experience with quality variation, but more specific to football. I have off-air HD NBC, and thats a great picture, Almost on par with my directv HD sat siginal. Hey, my best friend was over to watch the ohio State game, and is a browns fanatic, he's from Youngstown, That was good company, I took the 11-1/2 and Northwastern only cause O.S. games are always so tight. I am a Buc fan from their 1976 expansion days, o and four baby, cherishing the super bowl of 2002. Jon

Hi Joninflorida,

I have the 50-inch Samsung DLP as well (on loan, but I'll likely buy it) and I agree that HD broadcasts and DVDs are stunning. But I'd also say that standard broadcast non-HD material can look really awful. It varies quite a bit from one station to another (I'm on Time-Warner Digital cable).

Have you watched other standard non-HD stuff besides football? I joke with my friends that I've become a high-def snob. I can barely look at ordinary broadcasts unless I sit at least 15 feet away. I don't think it's any intrinsic flaw in the Samsung.

It's just that when you view old NTSC broadcasts with all its inherent flaws magnified to a large screen, the defects become more visible and annoying. I recommend a viewing distance of at least four times the diagonal screen size for standard broadcasts (non HD). It's one of the reasons I put off buying a large-screen TV until HD became established, because I felt all large screen sets looked relatively terrible compared to small direct-view CRT TVs (28 or 32 inch).

Regards,

How ironic is that Alan, didn't we just have a little sub discussion, Thanks for your video and audio input - no pun intended, Jon

i=interlaced
p=progressive

Correct me if I'm wrong guys but HD feeds are 1920x1080i or 1280x720p. DVD is 720x480p.
Non HD or NTSC is pretty much 320x300. So blowing up that resolution to the above higher definitions would look like my dog's poop. To alleviate this issue the only way I know to put it through a true video scalers
http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/video-scalers.htm

or a computer video rescaler like what I use.
http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/video-scalers.htm
Here are pics of standard cable TV feeds using a Viewsonic TV tuner/video rescaler. The broadcast is a little soft but definitely watcheable.
image 1112 onwards....
http://www.spacelofts.com/x1/

Saturn and Rob,

Your non-HD NTSC stuff through your scaler looks a lot like my NTSC stuff--so-so but watchable. All satellite boxes use varying levels of video compression depending on the degree of movement in the picture. That's so the system operators can cram more channels onto the bird's transponders.

Inevitably there will be compression artifacts that will show up, and in my view these may be exacerbated by further processing in the line-doublers in HD sets. On my Time-Warner box, I can choose what it will output and there are discernible differences.

Another oddity I've discovered is to split my cable feed and send one, with the analog VHF 2-13 signals to the Samsung's RF tuner input. Those non-HD NTSC channels often look superior to the same channels delivered by the Time-Warner digital box via component-video. On the other hand, some of the network or local station studio stuff that is up-converted to 720p (4:3 aspect ratio) looks very very good. Not as good as the original 1080i widescreen programs, of course, but much better than the standard NTSC stuff.

I'm still experimenting with all of this and will report on anything useful that I discover down the road.

Regards,

IMO, football games don't always look that great because of how far the camera is zoomed out - the players on the screen become kind of small and jaggy looking, right? When they zoom in for a close-up of a player's face it then looks pretty good again. A possibility.

In reply to:

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Inevitably there will be compression artifacts that will show up, and in my view these may be exacerbated by further processing in the line-doublers in HD sets. On my Time-Warner box, I can choose what it will output and there are discernible differences.

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Just to add to what Alan mentioned - the compression used for almost all NTSC video signals is a reduction of the resolution of the chroma (colour) side. Betacam is 4:2:2, meaning for every 2x2 block (a 4 pixel square) of discrete luminance (brightness) values (timed against the video subcarrier), there is only 1 discrete value of chroma. That brings the bandwidth required down from ~31MB/s to ~15.5MB/s. And for a normal NTSC tube, this is a darned good tradeoff.

1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4

1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4

Imagine this as part of your TV line - it has 16 distinct luma values (one on each of the pixels shown by numerals) but every group of 4 only has one colour value (all "same" numbers will have the same chroma value) - so if, say, one of the groups has two pixels from a maroon Texas A&M jersey and two pixels from the green grass, the colour behind all four pixels will be halfway between the two colours.

Problem is, once it hits a line doubler/up-res-er in a HD TV, resolution in the luminance channel is half the subcarrier, and chroma becomes a quarter of the subcarrier... still with me?

Now you have the following:

11 11 22 22
11 11 22 22

11 11 22 22
11 11 22 22

33 33 44 44
33 33 44 44

33 33 44 44
33 33 44 44

Each group of 4 pixels has a single luminance value and the group of 16 with the same number has the same chroma value.

Ouch.

Hope this made sense. I took a few liberties about the line doubling scale so I didn't have to worry about sub-pixel values, and pixels are realy phosphors in the analog domain, but you get the idea.

For those who care - DVCAM is 4:1:1, meaning it's 16 luma values for each chroma which is why, despite what product lit says, it is NOT broadcast quality.

Bren R.

Oops, also forgot to mention that all this was under "perfect" conditions... ie: you running the original source tape into your HDTV off a Beta VTR.

Add in the satellite broadcast compression and every other bit of ick... and you'll wonder that you get a signal at all.

Bren R.

What I have heard about sports is that the superior format is 720p because the progressive scan deals better with the movement. When we are seeing a poor picture we may be seeing 480i or 480p, both considered HD by some channels.