Ten Steps to a Better Picture: Part Two
You may be ready to make the big move
to high-definition TV (HDTV), but if you're like many buyers, your next set will be a
regular analog one. Last month, we outlined some simple steps
in the selection of the TV that's best for you. Here are some more:
6. Setting a budget
In your travels, you'll encounter a bewildering variety of
sizes and shapes of sets at all sorts of prices. That can be confusing, but it also means
you can save money by shopping around. To do that, you have to know what is
"normal."
One of the most popular set sizes is 27" (diagonal
measurement), and this can probably be taken as a minimum size for home-theater
applications. You can expect to get things like comb filters (for better resolution), vast
cable tuning capability (much larger than you'll ever need), onscreen menus, stereo sound,
and line inputs and outputs. As you go up in size (the max is usually 35-40") prices
climb proportionately.
Projection TVs are another ball game, starting at 40"
and rising. Prices for rear-projection CRT-based units tend to follow pretty much the same
dollars-per-inch pattern as the direct-view sets. More exotic technology -- Digital Light
Processing (DLP) and LCD tend to cost lots more, although prices are coming down. Most of
the non-CRT sets these days tend to be designed for HDTV, either now or later, so maybe
they should be considered for your next upgrade.
7. Physical limits
Bigger is definitely not always better when it comes to
television displays, so before you leap into the realm of projection TVs and their huge
images, give careful consideration to the size and shape of your viewing room. Even the
smallest projection units can be overwhelming in most rooms; you need a lot of space to
accommodate one of these comfortably. In many setups, the viewing positions are too close
to the set, and while that often gives a pleasing film-like feel to large-scale images,
such as long landscape shots or football games, it can be decidedly unpleasant when a face
fills the whole screen. And these large screens tend to make the individual scanning lines
of conventional TV very obvious.
In a lot of cases, picture quality is best served by a
theoretically undersized direct-view set than a large projector, even though the latter
are getting very close to regular monitors in visual performance. In the right place, a
projection TV is a must for home theater; in the wrong place it can be an expensive drag.
8. Moving things around
Actually finding the right placement for an image display
device -- and all the other pieces of an audio/video system -- can be an immense juggling
act, and one that may mean a lot of shuffling of equipment and people to get the right
balance. But you have to start somewhere, and since the television is often the heaviest
single piece of gear, it may make sense to position it first.
The first rule of thumb is that it should not be anywhere
that light could fall directly on its surface. With ordinary cathode-ray tube sets, this
may cause reflections that either obscure the picture or that prompt you to crank the
brightness up to overcome it. Excessive brightness causes "blooming" which
lowers horizontal resolution. With most projection televisions, light washes out images,
and with front-projection units, it can totally obliterate the picture.
The set should be placed so that it is easily viewable from
enough seats for the whole family to watch without anyone having to be very far off axis.
If that means the set has to be placed farther away than you had originally planned, so be
it; that's usually not all that much of a sacrifice, and if it is, a larger set may be the
answer.
Within limits, however, set-to-viewer distance is
surprisingly uncritical. My own unscientific observation is that for ordinary TV watching
and pan-and-scan movies, a 25" to 29" screen works best between eight and ten
feet from the main viewing seat. Some movies (including most letterboxed discs) look
better with the set a bit closer. Virtually any size rear-projection model looks fine at
15 to 18 feet, which is far enough to make the scan lines pretty much disappear but close
enough to provide a satisfyingly large image. Whatever sort of set you choose, it will
always seem a bit crisper if it's farther away.
9. Making the connection
In many systems, convenience suggests the old
through-the-antenna-terminals system is the way to go, as that's the simplest route to
recording one thing while watching another, and is otherwise a no-brainer when it comes to
switching between tapes and TV programs. If what you're looking for is optimal picture
performance, however, this approach definitely has big limitations. It requires that
signals from the source component be modulated -- turned into a signal that imitates what
would come from cable or an antenna -- and that the set's internal tuner demodulate it and
turn it back into a line-level signal. These two steps potentially degrade the signal
along the way and can be sidestepped by simply feeding the VCR's composite (RCA) video
output to the corresponding input on the monitor. This results in better picture
performance, but it may mean quite long cable runs from VCR to television.
One solution is to place the VCR and other control
equipment closer to the set; another is to use high-quality video cables to reduce line
losses. You can even make these yourself if you're handy with a soldering iron: simply
attach high-quality RCA plugs to each end of a piece of conventional 75-ohm TV cable. This
approach makes sense if you want to keep the rest of the equipment together near the
viewing position or in a convenient rack across the room. Often this line-level connection
can be supplemented by a conventional RF hookup to let you use the monitor's tuner
independently of the VCR or to employ some picture-in-picture features.
Best of all is to use whatever high-quality connections
your set allows. Usually these days, that's an S-video input at minimum, and many now
provide component inputs to use with your DVD player or satellite box.
10. The final tweak
Once you have decided which monitor to buy, bought it, set
it up in its optimal position, and hooked everything together electrically, there's one
vital step that should make all the rest worthwhile: the fine-tuning of the picture to
achieve the set's maximum performance.
Don't expect that the factory settings will necessarily be
ideal; they may be, but you shouldn't decide to keep them without experimenting with other
options. Most sets give you a fairly wide range of control over the important picture
parameters. You may decide to have a technician from the TV store do the original setup,
if that service is available, but his choices may not be yours either.
The first step is to balance contrast and brightness so
that the blacks are really black -- when the screen goes dark after a scene, it should
look like the set is off -- and yet the light material is bright enough. Generally, you
should tend to darker rather than lighter; you'll soon get used to the look, and it will
result in better resolution and color purity. Programs and movies are monitored on dark
screens and they tend to look better that way at home, too. Most factory settings are too
bright.
Color balance can be checked using the color bars some TV
stations broadcast when they're not on the air. Reduce the saturation ("color"
control) so the bars are not blooming into their neighbors, especially the reds, and then
adjust tint so that the yellow bar is really yellow, not greenish or orange. If there are
automatic color controls or noise reduction, defeat them.
To do the job properly, get hold of a proper setup disc and
follow the steps outlined on it. You should end up with your monitor looking as much like
an ideal monitor as is possible.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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