Re: Digital haze - no thanks
Good observation. One often missed. Adjustment is vital to getting a good picture.
And it is amazing what people will put up with for a tv picture..
A friend of mine sat through a big circular mark on his TV for years, before I got a bit of kitchen towel and washing up liquid and cleaned the sticker glue off the screen.He was so amazed, he called hos wife to take a look.
Disclaimer.. I'm not a videophile. Don't have high end super expensive kit. But I do know how to get the most out of what I have.
A TV picture is adjustable. CRT or LCD. And the adjustment is what makes it good. Out of the box it is NOT adjusted for home use.
Saturation turned up too high is common, So is having it too bright, or too sharp. And too sharp is like overdoing the sharpening filter on a graphics program. It causes artefacts every time.
Sadly, many people take it out of the box and tune it in, and that is the last they do with it. So of course the picture is crap.
They do the same with monitors, and wonder why their eyes hurt.
The next "problem" is inputs.
Composite is soft. Low resolution, and to be honest.. Not up to much. But a lot of people still use it. Digital sources are way better. Annoying perhaps, but it is the nature of the beast. The more mucking about at the TV side of the picture, the worse it looks. And LCDs are not good at showing lots of resolutions. CRTs are.
If you still need to use analogue.. Get some decent cables. Not the oxygen free quantum polarised money extraction systems, but spend a few quid if you are using RGB or S-video, and get one that is properly screened. Good cables for analogue makes a noticeable difference.
SCART should be used for tying ladders to roof racks. Nothing more.
And if you spend more than a fiver on a meter long HDMI cable, you are an idiot.
Get it right, and spend a bit of time getting a good panel, and spend a few minutes adjusting, and the picture is way better than CRT ever was. Get it wrong, and stubbornly insist on watching betamax through a cheap coax cable, with the factory defaults, and you deserve everything you get.