Poor SD picture on Pio Kuro
Discussion
Thomson Sky HD box to a Pioneer LX5090
I use the Plasma purely as a display. I haven't used the in-built tuner. All signals come from the Sky box via a Denon 2807 amp. I sit about 10 feet away.
Twice in the past week the picture quality on standard def. broadcasts of football from Italy have been close to unwatchable. It's worst on the wide-angle overhead images, not so bad on close-up images.
The picture from the Chelsea/Barcelona match was so bad I turned off and watched it on the inbuilt tuner on my 37" Toshiba LCD, which was much better.
Is the SD tuner element of the Sky box known to be poor? Is it a case of the Pioneer being too ruthless with poor-quality signals? The Barcelona/Real Madrid games last night was a cracker but again the picture was shocking.
I use the Plasma purely as a display. I haven't used the in-built tuner. All signals come from the Sky box via a Denon 2807 amp. I sit about 10 feet away.
Twice in the past week the picture quality on standard def. broadcasts of football from Italy have been close to unwatchable. It's worst on the wide-angle overhead images, not so bad on close-up images.
The picture from the Chelsea/Barcelona match was so bad I turned off and watched it on the inbuilt tuner on my 37" Toshiba LCD, which was much better.
Is the SD tuner element of the Sky box known to be poor? Is it a case of the Pioneer being too ruthless with poor-quality signals? The Barcelona/Real Madrid games last night was a cracker but again the picture was shocking.
50-inch is always going to begin to expose crappy SD images for what they are, and certainly going up to the 60s it can get pretty horrendous. To be fair, the Freeview SD tuner in the Kuros is pretty good compared to most others, so I'd be surprised if that was letting you down - thus as you say, your only remaining consideration is the Sky box...
Sky uses mpeg2 for its broadcast, this gives them the ability to trade off picture quality agains having more channels (more channels = more money), you will find on sky that some channels have a far worse picture than others, for example channel 5 being quite good compaired to Discovery real time being rather bad, it is most noticable normally when an image panns in one direction or another when the entire picture changes all at the same time it just looks like you are looking at a screen full of squares, also wide shots appear very undetailed. This is all quite normal, also the bigger the screen you go for the worse this will be (or more noticeable). When sky digital first came about there wasnt too many channels hogging bandwidth and TV's then where alot smaller so picture quality was better, now bandwidth is at a premium so they cram in as many channels as possible to return the most revenue then they tell us that we can get HD that gives us much better picture quality but at a price.
Its very doubtfull that you have a fault with your equiptment usually when it goes faulty its totally obvious that its a fault, also its doubtfull that your setup is the cause too, make sure then you have a HDMI lead connected from your sky box to your TV and that you are actually using it (you would be suprised how many SKY HD boxes i have come across that had a HDMI plugged in but it was tuned into channel 6!!!).
The only thing that comes to mind is do you have any type of cordless phone basestation or video sender near your sky box? Im told (but have never actually seen it myself) than they can really mess up a decent sky picture.
Its very doubtfull that you have a fault with your equiptment usually when it goes faulty its totally obvious that its a fault, also its doubtfull that your setup is the cause too, make sure then you have a HDMI lead connected from your sky box to your TV and that you are actually using it (you would be suprised how many SKY HD boxes i have come across that had a HDMI plugged in but it was tuned into channel 6!!!).
The only thing that comes to mind is do you have any type of cordless phone basestation or video sender near your sky box? Im told (but have never actually seen it myself) than they can really mess up a decent sky picture.
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