John_Cline, MYHD, Sony 34HS510, Dissappointed

JJKizak wrote on 12/7/2003, 10:03 AM
After receiving my new Sony HD capable TV (30 x 17 inch tube) and playing with it for about a week, my frustration has come to fro. Driving it with the MYHD card with DVI cable and also using my Viewsonic VX900 LCD monitor to view the analog signal the scaling problem is driving me nuts. If I select 1280 x 720P (this and 720 x 480p are the only resolutions that the TV will accept, The LCD monitor will accept almost all), the picture is filled out horizontally but not vertically. If I select Auto and zoom in the MYHD the picture is filled out but zoomed too much and a lot of the picture is wasted. It acts just like you would zoom a 4 x 3 picture without changing the aspect. The other problem is that two channels broadcast in 1920 x 1080I, one in 744 x 480, one in 704 x 480, one in 544 x 3 something, etc. Do I have to perform a major alignment scaling wise just to view another channel? This is really dog crap. The digital channels are better in quality but I did find out that the antenna and signal strength definitely affect the quality of the signal.
A weak signal will give the text the "wormy Crawllies" as the outlines of the text are clear and show everything that is behind the text. The backgrounds around the text warp like the Enterprise travelling through the anomalies in the expanse. The DVD movies are excellent
and it doesn't matter if the DRC on the TV is set to Interlace or progressive. The DRC (on the TV) doesn't seem to affect anything at anytime. My DVD player can switch from 480I to 480P but it didn't seem to make any difference with commercial DVD's. With the DVD's that I made from Vegas the DVD player must be in interlace or the picture is blurred. (rendered in interlace) The quality of the HD depends on weather the broadcast is live or a movie as everthing in between is grainy and fuzzy. HD is not very impressive and I am not impressed. The scaling problem is a nightmare. HD resolution is not even close to that of an LCD monitor in 1024 x 768. Yeah, I know the HD picture is much larger, but I think its all Hype.
After communicating with the MYHD people they said that all of the manufacturers are making their TV sets to be compliant with only what they want and that aint much. I probably won't buy another TV until they come out with automatic true HD scaling.
I will now spend much money improving the antenna system, adding an amplifier, replacing the lead in, adding pads to reduce the VSWR, and hope that it improves the "squigglies" . In my area Cable is not yet HD capable and the trees block the satellite stuff so thats it.
The 16 x 9 does work fine when on the TV NTSC tuner. Surprise surprise. I can now see how America is getting fat by viewing the short fat people on the 16 x 9 screen in HD.

JJK

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 12/7/2003, 12:00 PM
JJ,

I have never experienced any of the problems you are describing. The scaling problem is almost certainly the fact that you are running the HD TV using DVI. I've never been able to get it to work properly, but it seems to be the way the Sony TV is dealing with it, not the MyHD card. Nevertheless, I run the MyHD card into the Sony 34XBR910 HDTV via the analog component inputs and it looks absolutely flawless. I have never had a problem with getting the Sony HDTV to automatically display 1920x1080i, 1280x720p or 720x480i in all its 16x9 or 4x3 glory.

Since the DTV stuff is all digital, it will either look perfect or it won't appear at all. With marginal signal strength, you may have some dropouts, but "squigglies" are an analog TV artifact and will simply not occur on a digital broadcast. Getting a good roof-mount outdoor antenna and running high quality coax is always a good idea. I can't imagine there is anything to be "gained" by adding an amplifier and then padding it down. Now, this only applies to the DTV broadcasts, depending on your location and distance from the transmitters, analog reception may be more problematic. Of course, this is part of what DTV is designed to cure. I would go with a highly directional antenna with a lot of gain and then add an amplifier if necessary.

I am somewhat lucky in that the DTV and analog TV transmitters here in Albuquerque are located at the top of a 10,678 foot mountain. My house is at exactly 5,280 feet in elevation and the transmitters are 7 miles from here. My roof antenna has a completely unobstructed shot at the top of the mountain. Every DTV and analog channel comes in at 100% signal strength with no ghosting on the analog channels.

Anyway, HD really is very impressive and I am constantly impressed. Forget the DVI and use the component analog inputs to the TV. How far are you from the DTV transmitters and what brand and model of DVD player do you have?

John
JJKizak wrote on 12/7/2003, 5:05 PM
John:
First I must apologize for possibly inferring anything your way. It was not my intention. I will try the analog since it does seem to work better into my LCD monitor. My cable length is 36 feet and I wonder about that. So the analog cable is db 15 on one end and converted to component or "S" on the other end? I also use the remote on a 36 ft cable and it works flawlessly. My DVD player is a JVC progressive scan XV-S500. It can show interlace or progressive. Most of the transmitters are about 20 miles away and about the same elevation as my house. I use an older radio shack monster antenna
about 17 feet long with 75 ohm (Radio Shack coax) and the cheapo splitters.
The cable runs are about 25 to 40 feet. The TV stations are all transmitting different resolutions which drive me nuts.
The incomming signal from the antenna always contains noise and ghost components and the characteristic impeadance of the antenna, the cable, and the tuner are never perfect and always reult in reflected signal back to the antenna. The use of a 20 db pad on the tuner input will reduce the VSWR almost to nothing which is the way the industrial people correct for all the impedance mismatches provided the signal is 20 db more than what you need. This also reduces ghosting and noise buy 20 db. That why they like to use the pads. In analog the first color to be affected is red and you can actually see a quality difference when you throw the pad in provided you have enough signal. I do ge the "squigillies" on the analog but not on the digital but I do get a lot of the jagged edges on circular text that is applied at the tv station, but not on the original broadcast. I was used to working with RG8 with the type "N" connectors and "styroflex ". This Radio Shack cable seems like kiddy car stuff. Anyway thanks for the tip on the analog.

JJK
John_Cline wrote on 12/7/2003, 10:35 PM
JJ,

I didn't infer anything by your earlier message. No apology necessary.

36 feet is a fairly lengthy run for analog component video, but it shouldn't be a problem if you use high quality cable. You could get a short DB15 to BNC cable and, using BNC barrels, adapt a longer run of three EXACTLY EQUAL lengths of something like Belden 8281 coaxial cable with BNC connectors on each end. Then use BNC to RCA adapters to get into the television. This should work fine. Let's be clear that I'm talking about running component video (r-y, b-y, y) and not "S-Video."

About your antenna, the Radio Shack antenna is probably OK assuming it is a fairly directional UHF/VHF combo and in reasonably decent condition. On my setup, I run quad-shielded RG6 75-ohm coax from the antenna to a "Monster Cable" brand wide-band passive splitter on the roof, which splits through more RG6 and feeds two MyHD cards located in different parts of the house. One of the MyHD cards drives the Sony 34XBR910 in the "home theater" room and the other drives a 21" Viewsonic P810 computer monitor at 1920x1080i located in my computer room. (I can record on either MyHD and play files from either over the Ethernet network I have all my machines on.)

I'm pretty close to the transmitters here in Albuquerque, but the analog channels are ghost free, mainly because of the quad shielded coax runs. I had to be very careful about selecting the coax cable and making sure the "F" connectors were crimped well and screwed on tightly. By the way, I'm sure you already know this, but RG8 is 50 ohm coax and shouldn't be used in this application.

About the jagged edges on the text added to the digital broadcasts from the local station. That is certainly the local stations fault, not the MyHD card or the TV.

Thinking about the amplifier/pad thing. I can see your point about VSWR, however I might be a bit concerned about overloading the amplifier if the signal strength from the antenna exceeds the capabilities of the input stage of the amplifier. I'd try it with new, quad-shielded RG6 and a wide-band splitter before I started adding amplification.

Let me know how it all works out.

John