Toshiba 32WLT66 Picture Quality Woes - Upscaling Advice?

[Beechwoods]

I have a 32" Toshiba 32WLT66 which I bought in 2006 for about £700. At the time it was very highly regarded on the picture quality front, and it does have a very natural picture as far as colour and contrast are concerned.

I am getting increasingly frustrated at the amount of pixelation visible though. The inbuilt standard def Freeview looks pretty ropey, and standard def DVD playback (via scart) looks pretty pixelated too.

The picture from the high-def Apple TV box is acceptable, and I wonder if my issue is with the sources and not the TV.

So my question is: Does upscaling of standard def sources really make a difference? Is it best to get an upscaling box, in which case does this rely on a digital signal in (HDMI) to work best, or am I better off getting an Upscaling DVD player? If the latter, my budget is £40 or £50 :lol:

What about 'upscaling' Freeview boxes? I need the picture to look OK with standard def sources. There's not enough HD freeview material to worry about at the moment.

Thanks for any advice chaps.

[Reid Malenfant]

Ummm, bit of a difficult one this :scratch: If i'm right you haven't got a full HD panel, only 1366 x 768 pixels & this is going to be problematic when it comes to upscaling by anything other than the TV itself :(

You might get away feeding it a 1080i (interlaced) signal & letting the thing de-interlace & generate it's own 768P image but you'd be far better off giving it 720P which is about as common as hens teeth from anything that upscales nowadays as everything is geared for 1080P, but then again i haven't really looked to see what they can be set to so you may be in luck :scratch:

The only thing i can suggest is you look around for something like a Denon DVD player from the same series as the DVD2910 or DVD2930 as these have different output configurations & can be set to output 720P rather than 1080i/P..

You should also have a set of component video inputs & if for some reason HDMI isn't available component video will result in a much better picture. Scart is pretty naff at the end of the day :eyebrows:

[Beechwoods]

Thanks Mark. In retrospect, DVD's don't look too bad, at least good ones - we watched Star Wars IV (A New Hope) today and it looked good. The menus look slightly jaggy but the film itself looks OK. I swapped over to the composite connection and while I didn't spot much difference on the picture taking the audio directly from the DVD player to the TV made a big difference to background noise levels which was nice.

It's a shame the Freeview picture is so bad, but to be honest there, it varies from station to station. We end up watching a lot of kids TV and that is really badly compressed. The main BBC channels aren't as bad, but frankly, how the BBC think they can get away with such visible compression artefacts on standard def is beyond me.

[Reid Malenfant]

Hi Nick, i think if you watched it on a CRT you'd not notice any compression ;) It's simply the fact that you have an older TV model with much lower contrast & poorer upscaling compared to more modern models.

As i did mention though, if you could feed it something it doesn't need to chew on too much the results should still be much better, the problem being it's not 720 pixels or 1080, but 1366 x 768 (again if i remember right :scratch:) & this is a format that was never really supported. It was more of an "i have slightly more pixels than you thing :ner:" :eyebrows:

Feed it a proper 720P pic & it might just show a small black band around everything, though i'm not sure. It might try to scale it to 768P & again this could be problematic..

I guess now you see why i waited well over a year after 1080P TVs were available before i ever purchased an LCD TV ;)

[Beechwoods]

I wonder if the Beeb's control rooms these days are rigged with LCD's or CRT's :scratch: I suspect it's still the latter...

[Reid Malenfant]

Yes, but they won't just be using any old monitor :eyebrows: If you had a blu ray player i'd suggest you grab yourself Digital Video Essentials (DVE) HD Basics disc & spin it... You'd then get a much better idea of what they are monitoring on :)

Aint no TV i can tell you ;) Broadcast monitors are a little different...

[pwood]

new tv time was my first thought then remembered that free view HD is being rolled out this year so you could get an hd pvr which all have all do 1080i which would be the better option for your screen as throwing away pixels is easier to do.

Regards the DVD player buy a low cost blueray machine which will scale your old DVDs and allow blue ray playback as well. Check you tv can do 24fps though otherwise blurays will judder on slow pans.

Or get a new tv which At that sort of size can be got very cheap.