A Guide to Better
Video
The first time I visited a TV station
after color television had been introduced, I was astonished at the picture quality of the
sets I saw there. These weren't the monitors in the control rooms, although nothing is
quite as spectacular as a well-set-up pro monitor, but the ordinary televisions in the
various reception areas. Typically, these were ordinary consumer TVs, but they sure didn't
look like the color sets one encountered in real living rooms.
Although black and white was still the norm in those days,
I did have a few friends who had made the move into color, and my own parents shortly
bought a set, so I had some idea of what was coming over the airwaves. Lots of it was
garbage: faded prints of old movies, programs and commercials where no effort was made to
get the color balance right, wonky cable signals -- all contributed to less-than-pristine
color images.
The sets in the TV stations received a clean, direct feed,
to be sure, but that wasn't enough to account for the difference in quality. In
retrospect, I realize that those televisions had the benefit of being adjusted by
technicians who knew what a color TV picture should look like, and the proper conditions
under which it should be viewed, and tweaked the sets accordingly. By today's standards,
those early color televisions boasted pretty poor performance, but it was not nearly as
bad as it would appear from the way most people watched them.
Nearly everyone who plunked down megabucks for a color TV
(and the early ones were very expensive) mostly marveled that there was color at all.
Sure, if all the faces were green or the sky was pink they might give the tint control a
tweak, or if the picture looked like one of those old hand-tinted postcards, they might
crank the color level a notch, but lots of viewers were content just to leave things as
they were.
At the other end of the spectrum were the twiddlers, who
constantly tried to compensate for the undeniable fact that color varied wildly from
station to station, and even program to program. The worst was my father, who was always
fooling around with the controls . . . even though he was color-blind. Twiddlers almost
always got it wrong.
Today's sets are far more sophisticated, and there is much
more likelihood that they will give an acceptable picture right out of the box. By the
same token, once a set has been properly adjusted, there is much less call to change the
settings than with older televisions.
Still, simply sticking the TV in a corner of the family
room and turning it on is likely to yield performance far inferior to what even a modest
set can achieve. Fortunately, there are a number of steps you can take to improve things
dramatically, without having to plunge deeply into technophilia.
The first step is to evaluate what sort of television you
have to work with. The older the set, the fewer the amenities, and that may limit the
number of improvements you can make. But no matter how simple your equipment, there are
some steps you can perform, and they'll all improve your viewing experience.
First, check the rear panel to see what connections you can
make. Older sets have only antenna terminals, which severely limit how your set can be
integrated with the rest of your equipment. Better is a set of line-level inputs (check
for RCA jacks) for both audio and video; even better are stereo audio inputs, which are
typically marked in white and red.
Audio outputs are useful as well, especially if you want to
upgrade your audio by feeding it through an external stereo system, without going the
whole home-theater route. Look for a headphone jack on the front panel as well; it will
come in handy for late-night viewing without disturbing others and, in a pinch, could be
used to feed a stereo system.
The picture controls should be adequate to make proper
corrections. The brightness control should have enough range to make the picture go
completely black during fade-outs and to fill in details in very dark scenes. The color
control should let you turn the picture down to black and white, and up to neon garishness
at the top. The tint control should make faces bright magenta at one end, green at the
other. Wimpy controls may not make correct adjustments impossible, but it may make them
much more difficult to achieve.
Also make sure your set is functioning properly. Look for
color fringes around white objects, usually red on one side, green on the other, and
little rainbows in the corners of the screen. Both are signs of convergence problems.
Also, things should not move at different rates in different parts of the screen, as when
the credits roll or the camera pans from left to right. There should not be a loud buzz
every time something bright happens on the screen. All these things may need professional
service. Or, if television is an important enough part of your life, it may suggest that
it's time to shop for a new set.
What you watch is important, of course, but from the point
of view of quality, where it comes from may have more effect. There are two sorts of
sources -- real time and recorded -- and there is a quality hierarchy for each. Optimizing
your signal is usually simply a matter of what source you choose.
By far the largest number of sets are connected to analog
cable systems and, while these offer excellent choice of program material, they often
provide the lowest level of performance. On the other hand, in many cases, there is little
option but to hook up to the local cable system, and then the only method of improving
quality is by complaining if service is poor.
For local signals, a rooftop antenna can usually deliver
cleaner pictures, especially if a rotor lets you aim it directly at the transmitter of the
station you're watching. This option is not really practical for most, however, unless
there is already an antenna on your house that still works.
In some areas, digital cable offers a step up from the
normal variety, as does so-called "wireless cable," which is also digital. Both
these systems are, so far, limited to fairly narrow areas, but both will undoubtedly
expand with time. Ultimately, they may supplant conventional cable entirely, but that is a
long way off.
Digital satellites offer superb quality and almost
universal availability, as long as there is somewhere on the exterior of your home that
you can aim the dish to the southwest. Selection is similar to cable, even down to the
availability of local stations in some areas, and the quality is considerably better.
True digital television (DTV), including high definition,
is the ultimate, of course, but we'll reserve that for another time.
Unquestionably, the most common delivery system for
recorded video material is still the VHS cassette, and technically it is by far the
poorest. What it lacks in performance, it makes up for in selection, however, so we're all
destined to watch a lot of tape for a while yet.
There's not a lot that can go wrong with a VCR in normal
operation. Picture quality can be optimized by connecting the machine to the TV by its
line-level outputs, if possible, and making sure the heads are clean -- buying a
head-cleaning cassette is a wise investment, especially if you have a library of older,
grungier tapes.
If you do more off-air recording than tape renting, you
might consider an S-VHS recorder as a replacement. These have come way down in price in
the past couple of years, and offer near-broadcast-quality images. They'll play your
regular tapes as well.
At one time, the best upgrade for serious video watchers
was a laserdisc player. That format has gone the way of the dodo, in the face of the much
superior DVD player, so unless you have a library of the 12" discs, I wouldn't
recommend laserdisc.
DVD is king of the hill when it comes to recorded video, of
course, and it's safe to assume that it's in most people's future. Even if your present
set can't reproduce the nuances of the improved picture, your next one will, and it's hard
to imagine any television that wouldn't benefit to some degree from the technology.
The way you connect your video components together is a
matter of some importance. Even when their equipment allows otherwise, many viewers simply
hook their source components to the antenna terminals of their TV sets. That works, of
course, but at some cost in performance. It does have the advantage, however, that the
equipment can be far apart -- you can run very long stretches of 75-ohm cable without any
visible degradation of the picture (beyond that inherent in using the antenna inputs).
Far preferable is using the line-level connections, which
feed the video signal directly from the source to the set, bypassing its tuner. S-video
inputs are also often provided, but these rarely offer much in the way of visual
improvement, except in the case of DVD and satellite reception. Line-level connections are
also a must if you have several sources, which can be switched either by an audio/video
receiver or, in some cases, by the set itself.
If you opt for line-level connections, but have some
distance between source and set, longer cables are available, or can be made simply by
adding RCA plugs to the ends of a chunk of 75-ohm TV cable.
All those picture controls on modern sets are there to be
used -- don't imagine that the factory settings are ideal. Mostly they make the set look
dramatic in the store, but are far too extreme for home use.
There are test discs that let you set your picture
properly, but mostly you can do so by eye. The first thing to realize is that the picture
was probably far too bright when you bought the set. Turning the brightness down has the
double advantage of making the picture more film-like, and optimizing the set's horizontal
resolution.
My rule of thumb is that you should turn the level down to
a point where it seems too dark at first, and then get used to it. It helps if the room is
quite dark as well (television signals are always produced in dim control rooms). The
blacks should be really black, and the contrast (or picture) control then adjusted so that
the whites are pure but not "blooming."
Color can usually be set using faces (local, live newscasts
are good), as long as you realize that your first impulse will be to have too much color.
Turn it down a notch, and then set for natural tint. If you tune in the color bars many
stations broadcast when they're off the air, the yellow should be a proper lemon yellow,
and the reds should not bloom into the adjacent bars.
The set should be positioned so that neither windows nor
lamps reflect off the screen. The latter is usually a matter of moving the lamps; the
former might mean changing the set's location, or adding heavy drapes to the windows.
One last enhancement won't improve your picture, but it may
well improve your mood. Increasingly, a video system consists of a number of components,
and each one comes with its own remote control. That's fine for setup and major
adjustments, but for day-to-day viewing it can be a pain.
Increasingly, however, the remotes that come with TV sets,
VCRs and cable/satellite boxes can operate the basic functions of several machines. Life
will be simpler if you figure out how to operate everything from one remote, even if you
have to go back to the separate units for the more arcane adjustments.
Considering the amount of time most of us spend in front of
the tube, and the amount of money spent on the equipment we use to watch video material,
it only makes sense to spend a little effort to optimize how it presents its images.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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