Grainy DVDs on LCD tv

[themalster]

Hi guys,

I have a Panasonic LCD tv and Sky HD. When i watch Sky on the tv the quality is good. However, when i watch a DVD the quality of the picture is ok but grainy - nowhere near as good as HD. For example, i was watching Angels And Demons on DVD but the picture quality is not HD quality.

I have a scart lead from the TV to the DVD player but a HDMI cable from the TV to my Xbox, Could that have something to do with it?

Any help is greatly appreciated

[carlton23]

You will only get HD if the film etc is in HD format.

[ChuckFickens]

"when i watch a DVD the quality of the picture is ok but grainy - nowhere near as good as HD"

That will be because DVD's are not HD, they are about half the resolution of HD

If you want HD you need a blu-ray player and blu-ray films, not DVD.

[hc4361]

Your dvd player will need to be blu ray to watch hd dvds in hd quality.

[magicmerlin]

Does your dvd player have the capability to upscale to 1080i or better?

[deggers316]

no standards dvd should be grainy ! even if there copies,
there's something amiss with your system,
and dont expect hd sharpness if it not a blue ray disc.
i have an up scaler player and connected by composite its "almost" as good as hd that i'm not bothering with blue ray

[ChuckFickens]

good gawd! there are so many problems with the recent answers to this I hardly know where to start!

hc, I would have thought you'd have known better than to mix and match the terms "DVD" "blu-ray" and "HD-DVD" they are 3 totally different formats and should never be mixed like that. Saying "blu-ray DVD player" is like say "DVD vhs video player" it simply doesn't work.

Deggers, your DVD player is not upacaling if you are connecting using composite, Composite is an SD only form of connection. if you want to take advantage of the DVD's upscaling then you need to connect using HDMI or component video. the only advantage of using composite is it's an inherently slightly blury connection so it blurs out any imperfections you might otherwise see if you were to use a digital connection.

That said upscalling DVD players are by and large a total waste of money. if you use a normal DVD player then it will be upscaled by the TV anyhow so by buying an upscalling DVD player you are possibly paying extra to use a worse quality upscaling chip then the TV was using in the first place (the upscalers in TV's tends to be pretty good, the ones in other devices are sometimes not as good (i.e. the sky HD box's upscaler is total crap))

[deggers316]

chuck yes i know this about hdmi cable i'm not a novice, but as luck would have it the hdmi socket has snapped out of the internal card sio useless ! component next best thing,yes it used to upscale when it was hdmi to 720 but the pic is a near as dam it to that, its a samung 40 lcd 5 years old and has only one (now dead) hdmi socket, too expensive to repair,so waiting a couple of years before i get another more update tv and bigger

[deggers316]

and it definitely NOT blurry !

[deggers316]

sorry chuck on my earlier answer i wrote composite instead of component

[ChuckFickens]

I didn't wish to wound patronising, apologies if I did.

It makes a big difference that you meant component, because, although still analogue, component can happily run at a much higher bandwidth (therefore resolution) than composite for the simple reason that the signals are kept seperate so eliminating cross talk between the luminance and chroma signals that composite is prone to at high bandwidths (causing dot crawl)