Bought LED TV, broadcast TV looks great, Blu-rays & DVDs look horrible

Frraksurred

Frraksurred

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 25, 2008
Messages
2,751
So I've never seen this before. I bought a Samsung 6150 series LED, which I understood to be a decent mid-range offering from Samsung. It took some tweaking to get the colors and contrast to look natural out of the box, but for the most part broadcast HD looks good now. However, some channels, and ESPECIALLY Blu-rays and DVD's (via HDMI) look flat and fake, like they were recorded for low budget TV. The lighting is so flat it reminds me of the 80's soap operas my Mom used to watch. The same movies, played from the same Sony BDP-S301 Blu-ray player, looks amazing on my 30" Dell U3011.

Any ideas? From what I've read there is no burn in process for LED's, I've tried several different modes on the TV, along with playing with individual settings (to a degree). I do not understand why this thing looks so good on one HD channel, and so poor on another, particularly when both are playing recent HD source material. Am I missing something, or did I just buy a junk TV? Thanks for the help.
 
It sounds like you have some post-processing motion smoothing going on (The 120 Hz True Motion mode or whatever Sony calls it). Great for sports, awful for movies. Try to see if you can turn motion smoothing off, or look for options that reference "motion" or "sports mode", or anything of the like.

Maybe someone who has a similar Samsung LED TV can chime in and help you, I've got an LG Plasma so I don't know anything about the Samsung menu interface.
 
I would say that it is a calibration issue and if you look at a dedicated AV forum like avsforum for your screen settings (people usually post their custom settings) or get it calibrated by someone it will look much better. It is your screen calibration that will affect how well content looks.
 
Thanks for the replies. I will look into any motion smoothing related stuff in the menu and check out avsforums (had forgotten about them).

It has been a long time, but I used to calibrate HDTV's I sold after delivery to the customer's home. I've thought about picking up a Spyder, but simply had greater priorities in the budget. If I cannot figure it out online, I may have to go shopping. Either way, thanks again.
 
Also, look into dynamic contrast settings and the like. My new Samsung PDP 60" Plasma had some really aggressive eco-mode and dynamic black/white adjustments going on.
 
On my Samsung TV, the setting is called Motion Blur. Yeah, turn that off.

Edit: On my TV, it's a per-source setting...so make sure you're turning it off on all your inputs that you use.
 
Frraksurred said:
So I've never seen this before. I bought a Samsung 6150 series LED, which I understood to be a decent mid-range offering from Samsung. It took some tweaking to get the colors and contrast to look natural out of the box, but for the most part broadcast HD looks good now. However, some channels, and ESPECIALLY Blu-rays and DVD's (via HDMI) look flat and fake, like they were recorded for low budget TV. The lighting is so flat it reminds me of the 80's soap operas my Mom used to watch. The same movies, played from the same Sony BDP-S301 Blu-ray player, looks amazing on my 30" Dell U3011.

Any ideas? From what I've read there is no burn in process for LED's, I've tried several different modes on the TV, along with playing with individual settings (to a degree). I do not understand why this thing looks so good on one HD channel, and so poor on another, particularly when both are playing recent HD source material. Am I missing something, or did I just buy a junk TV? Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

Some (all?) Samsungs retain different settings for each HDMI port. So you may have optimized your cable TV. If you use a different HDMI port for blu-ray, then you have to redo the settings. The motion enhancements are affecting it too. There are two, blur and I forget the other. One smooths frame to frame and I found a tiny bit of this is good. The other adds frames and I found this was responsible for Soap Opera / 70's news room effect. Turn that off.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top