Is this what to expect from LCD?

I have had a toshiba DLP 720p (62HM85) for like 4 years now and liked it. It was big and the bulb blew out once a year but i liked it for the most part the picture was crisp and even with lower quality sources it was ok, i noticed the diff but it was at least acceptable.

I recently had some trouble with it and decided to get a new set. I went for a LG (55LH40) 1080p 120hz set. I like the form factor and i wall mounted it and am running it off the same box and HDMI cable the other was on but I find myself disapointed. almost to the point where I cant watch this thing. too frustrating.

First off this is my first LCD. I never noticed any of this on my DLP and I would have. I picked up on this right away on this set.

1. Why is it that at 1080i (havent seen anything broadcast in 1080p yet) the picture is fantastic. but any other resolution sucks? anything lower looks like it has jaggies almost like anti aliasing is off in a game. 1080 looks good but everything else is terrible. kinda fuzzy in a way too. jaggies and fuzzy 720p looked good on my old set. 720p looks like crap on this.

2. Why does the edge of everything pixelate even during slight movement? not fast moving sports but just a simple pan up or down or pan left to right pixelates the edges of everything. i thought 120hz sets did not have these issues? I mean a guy can't walk across the screen without pixelated edges as he moves

3. why does the picture lag? pan left to right or up and down with people in the foreground and it lags like a game would when the card cant handle the settings.

Is this what I am to expect from LCD?? I mean it's frustrating, at times it fantastic, then someone walks through the screen and I see pixelation, then it pans and lags. then I change the channel and if its not 1080 it looks like garbage, all jaggied and just a touch fuzzy.

anyone care to enlighten me? I am at a loss.

i dont have any of those issues with 720p... not sure..

perhaps the 120hz is at fault.... with the source...

I don't have these issues with my CRT projector... maybe you should jump ship

Well a couple of things. DLP projectors can handle motion better than an LCD TV so I think the "blur" effect is what you see from time to time. This is probably the biggest downside to LCD technology , they are trying to make it better each year but from the sound of it you would been far better off with a 2010 Panasonic plasma , its motion handling is far better and even exceeds DLP.

If you can return it without a lot of hassle I would consider it or deal with issues and get use to it. Or just get a 1080p DLP projector , from what I've read they are quite quality and are exactly what your use to.

LCDs have pretty bad ghosting still, even if they're trying to cover it up with various techniques. If you want a good picture, image quality and refresh rate without ghosting, go PDP. The Panasonic 46" 1080p PDP my housemate got over a year ago has been completely awesome for any kind of content. Comparing it in the store with LCD TVs it was already very obvious that while playing the same source (action scene from I, Robot), the LCD TVs were a blurry, ghosting and jaggy mess whereas the PDPs were keeping up easily.

PDP is for quality, LCD is for people who want cheap, even at the cost of quality

RayDaddy said:

1. Why is it that at 1080i (havent seen anything broadcast in 1080p yet) the picture is fantastic. but any other resolution sucks? anything lower looks like it has jaggies almost like anti aliasing is off in a game. 1080 looks good but everything else is terrible. kinda fuzzy in a way too. jaggies and fuzzy 720p looked good on my old set. 720p looks like crap on this.

Click to expand...

Well, when you feed a 720p source (or lower) into an LCD display that has a native resolution of 1080p, you're going to experience a loss of image quality due to interpolation/scaling if you're filling the screen with the image. You can read more about that here. LCD TVs with higher quality video processing electronics can mitigate these effects. Also, you can try a 1:1 pixel mapping mode to see what effect that has.

That said, it sounds like you may want to consider returning the TV and asking for alternatives over avsforum .

I have that LG set. It isn't bad, but it does need a lot of tweaking out of the box. AVSForum and CNet both had calibration guides for the xxLH40 sets, I played around with a few of the ones people have posted and reached some middle ground.

1. 1080i and 720p both look great once the settings are tweaked. Out of the box or with bad image settings, both can look horrible. Try setting the input mode to Just Scan and then tweak the image settings.
2. Ghosting is from the LH40's bad rendition of 120HZ upscaling. Turn off TrueCinema and turn off TruMotion (or whatever the 120HZ setting is called). Both of them have to be off to completely remove the 120HZ effect. You might do well to turn off the edge enhancement as well, which is step 1 in most people's posted settings. With EE off I can use the 120HZ set to low for most things on the cable box, high for sports, but I still see ghosting on the htpc for anything except blu-ray.
3. Haven't seen that problem before, either on live TV or with WMC's picture wall doing a lot of panning. Combined with the other issues, maybe the set needs some warranty attention, either fixed or swapped out.