New telly, all signals look pants - new cables?

[UKMuFFiN]

Okay, got my flashy new TV, but SD broadcasts and DVDs look absolute pants. My mate reckons its the cables and swears by nice pricey cables, any recommendations? SCART is what im after, Im the sort of person that finds £30 very expensive for a scart cable so would these be any good? Anyone know of any other suppliers?

http://www.tvcables.co.uk/cgi-bin/tv...XFT02-150.html

Cheers.

[TWOTELLYS]

a friend of mine had this problem with his brand new plasma was a earth lead on the tv some engineer came out adjusted it and hey presto
may help and may not but worth telling you before shelling out obscene amounts on a scart cable

[UKMuFFiN]

As in needing a service engineer to come and fiddle with the earth lead inside the telly, or earth lead in the power cable? Im prob gonna just try them scart cables for £8

[trippinzippy]

Don't mean to point out the obvious, but it could also be down to the brightness/contrast/backlight settings, most HDTV's seem to need a little playing with to get SD pictures looking good, have a search about on www.avforums.com for your model of tv.

[UKMuFFiN]

Lol, cheers for that, my fault for not saying in my original post but I have had a fiddle with the settings

[TWOTELLYS]

Originally Posted by UKMuFFiN

As in needing a service engineer to come and fiddle with the earth lead inside the telly,

yeah inside on a new tv eh
beggars belief

[charleski]

There's something wrong with the telly. New cables will do squat for the quality.

[bigblue]

Possibly not much wrong with the TV, sadly probably just what happens when you upscale SD pics to HD res.

It really all depends what you mean by "pants" Are we talking smeary and noisy or really unwatchable ?

Good scart cables will give an improvement over freebie in-box ones, but nothing astonishing if the picture really is that bad. That Ixos is pretty good, you really don't need to spend any more.

Have you any THX optimisers on your DVD's ? It's ok fiddling with the settings, but the trouble is most folks still leave the settings waaaay too high.

What TV is it anyway ? Can you not try it with a HD feed from your PC to see if it looks just as pants with HD ?

[UKMuFFiN]

lol my pc weighs a ton but I spose I could try it. "Pants" as in grainy and just 'ych a fi' but not like dodgy-tv-pants if that makes sense :S. Sorry, I feel a bit monged up atm - cold etc.

I'll prob just get the one cable for now for DVD player, Im planning on buying an upscaling HDMI one next month (pay) and hopefully, parents will get Sky+, Whats the best way to connect that?

Out.

[starbuck]

1 basic thing a lot of people forget to do is set the outputs correctly. On my DVD and cable box, you can set the outputs to composite, rgb etc so choose the best one for you(if it's scart, you'd be looking at rgb).

secondly, with a scart lead, you want a fully wired scart(ie all 21 pins are wired), this will give you better quality than a std el cheapo scart.

With my scart cables, I searched around on ebay and various shops online and never paid more than about £25 for some good cables(names escape me).

If you want one from high street shop, I'd go get some thor scarts from maplins. good cables and normally about £20-25.

IMPORTANT POINT: check the length you need as I've overspent many times before as I've guessed and been way out - getting a too-short cable and having to go all the way back to get a longer one or worse still, getting one too long and trying to keep all the cable tidy.

[starbuck]

btw, just looked at the original post link to an ixos cable and that's a good cable(great price as well), just remember to check the length.

[Funkstar]

thats a very good point about SCART, and something i often forget. As SCART can handle composite, RGB and s-video (in a leter revision), bundled cables are only composite.