Six Simple Tricks to Improve Your Television enjoyment

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Six Simple Tricks to Improve Your Television Enjoyment
So, you now have that big flat screen TV, but it doesn’t seem to have quite the same impact it had at the store. Well, don’t despair. There are a number of simple things you can do to really improve your enjoyment and bring out the best of that new TV.

1. Change the video mode:
Televisions ship from the factory in a mode that will “pop” in a store display. The TV has to compete with a couple hundred other sets, so the manufacturer sets the contrast to max and the color to a blue tint, so the set will stand out. All TVs come with a mode setting in the video settings section that allow you to tailor the set to more normal calibration. Try setting it to a mode labeled “Cinema”, “Movie”, “Professional” or “THX”. It may look dull and dark right after you make the change, but you should give it awhile to get used to it. You will find that the blacks have more detail, the whites aren't washed out and the fleshtones look natural and not cartoonish.

You eventually should consider doing a more formal calibration, and we describe that in other topics here, but this will go a long way toward getting you started.

2. Get a high definition cable box or satellite receiver:
Most folks receive their broadcasts via cable or satellite. Odds are that your existing cable box is standard definition and will give less than an ideal picture. A high definition box, along with HD service from your provider will give you a much better picture. You might want to consider upgrading to a DVR at the same time. Most people who have them can’t live without them, but that’s a different topic.

3. Check Your Connections:
Now that you have that HD cable box, take a look at the back of the system and see how the installer connected it. All too often, the cable box is connected with the black coax connections where the TV is tuned to channel 3 or 4. This is the worst possible connection and has the effect of converting your fancy new HD cable box back to the SD one you just replaced. In order to get the best signal with the least clutter, the cable box should be connected with an HDMI cable. These cables are available from a wide variety of places at wildly varying prices. Hint: There is no performance improvement from the expensive premium cables from places like Monster. With a little shopping, a good 3-6’ cable can be had for under $10 from places like Amazon, Monoprice.com or Blue Jean Cables. If your cable box doesn’t have an HDMI connection, a component cable can be used to deliver HD video. This is the red/green/blue RCA connectors on the back of the set, but you will also need to connect the red/white RCA connectors for audio if you use these, or better still, use an optical digital audio (TOSLINK) cable to connect to a receiver.

4. Consider a BluRay Player:
Blu Ray players have really come down in price recently and can be had for well under $100. Blu Ray provides the best picture available today at a very reasonable price. Most players have the added benefit that they can be connected to the internet and have additional applications to provide streaming content from Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, etc. Expect a dedicated article soon on choosing a budget Blu Ray player.

5. Improve your sound system:
Half of the modern home viewing experience is in the sound. However, the speakers and amplifiers that come with TVs are very poor performers (and I am being generous). There are a number of options available at costs ranging from a couple of hundred dollars up to the stratosphere. The simplest and least costly overall is to add a soundbar. These can be had starting at around $150. A soundbar will give what is best described as good TV sound. You will get a fuller range of audio and true stereo. Better ones will include a subwoofer. However they will not give you that enveloping surround sound. Great for TV. Not so great for BluRays.

If you need surround, you need to move up to either a HTIB (home theater in a box) or a receiver and speakers. The HTIB is more convenient, but often less flexible. The receiver/speaker combination can be as inexpensive, but require more shopping. Again, there will be a more comprehensive article on selecting these components, but some basic steps are to look for a system with a powered subwoofer, and switching that processes the HDMI signal. Try to find at least 4 HDMI inputs as eventually you may have that many devices. My system has connections for BluRay, my TIVO, an old HD-DVD player and now a ROKU box. It just happens. If the receiver has a calibration program, use it to set the speakers.

6. Perform Regular Maintenance:
Screens get dirty over time and will cause loss of contrast and brightness. A quick pass with Windex works wonders. Similarly, dust filters should be cleaned twice a year. Settings have a habit of getting changed, so once you have a setup you like, write it down and periodically check that the system is still set. However, be aware that the TVs performance will change over time, so a calibration disc is a good investment and should also be run periodically, as should the audio calibration routines.
 
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7. Get over the idea that black pixels are wasted pixels.
That is, if a program has black bars at the top and bottom or at the sides, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Resist the urge to distort the screen format so that they go away.
 
8. Control the amount of light in your viewing room. Although not everyone has a dedicated viewing room, blocking excess light is generally a good thing. This ties in directly with #1 above.
 
High performance hdmi cables don't do any difference compared to regular hdmi cables? I can't start to tell you how wrong that is.. I have tested this so many times with so many customers. There is a reason dish offers for sale a high end hdmi cable or you can use the lower end one that comes with the box.
I have put them side by side to with customers that had TVs near each other and anyone could tell during a good action packed movie you could really tell.
Another test I do with my customers is randomly plug in the lower end hdmi cable then the high end one and let the customer see what one they think is better. I would say 97% of my customers could tell a good difference and I sell them our hdmi cabels


Posted Via The SatelliteGuys Reader App!
 
LMAO!!!

Whatever. There is no difference in PQ between a "high speed" $5 mono price HDMI cable and a $20 "high speed" blue jeans cable version. I spend a little more on BJC only because of build quality and durability. Nothing audio or video there. The reason Dish (and you) sell this "premium" HDMI cable is there is a ton of profit in it...

If you really want a good HDMI cable, Ive seen one for about $500 :)

Unless Dish is just packing some complete garbage (which I havent seen), then this is just nonsense. If they were, the customer does not need your overpriced cable, a $5 one will do.

See this: http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=102&cp_id=10240&cs_id=1024008&p_id=3992&seq=1&format=2

It's actually pretty shatty if you think about it. "Hi, I work for Dish, and since this HDMI cable that came with the DVR is utter garbage (from Dish), I have one I can conveniently sell you".
 
Sorry, there is no difference in PQ/AQ between an inexpensive HDMI cable (mediabridge, monoprice, BJ, etc.) and an expensive cable (Monster, Audioquest, etc). Been doing this forever. Analog cables are a different story. There are several threads in the "General Home Theater Advice, Tips and Discussion" forum.

S~
 
Kind of a shame if the value of this article gets buried in a discussion about overpriced cables.

HDMI is a DIGITAL signal. The data is encoded as a digital stream and protected by checksums and parity. A cable would need to be so bad that it changed the digital pattern of the signal. This will show up in one of three ways. First, there may be "sparklies" where some pixels go white or black. Second there may be macroblocking where parts of the picture freezes. In the worst case, the picture will not be decoded at all. If none of that happens, the cable is just fine.

As for the quality of the image itself, this is controlled by two factors. First is the encoding technique employed by the content provider (i.e. the people who pressed the BluRay or the guys who encoded that TV program). That is totally beyond your control.

The second half is the decoding in the TV itself. The decoding of the data stream is accomplished by chips built into the TV. Again, this is something beyond your control, and cables won't affect it. What you can change is how the output of that digital stream appears once it has been converted back into an analog signal. This is what I attempted to address with point #1 in the main article. You can do a lot to improve the picture by simply selecting a different mode such as 'cinema' 'professional' or 'THX'. If you really care about the picture, take that money you were going to put into that expensive cable, and spend it instead on an ISF calibration. This is a place where spending some money has a big effect, and you will be simply amazed at how that picture looks.

Edit: I should have added to my first point that even if you see artifacts like macroblocking, it usually is not the cable. Most often it is weak signal or defective encoding at the other end. You know, how it always macroblocks in the last 2 minutes of the football game, or when the detective is about to unmask the killer :) Talk to your cable company, or put up a better OTA antenna (covered elsewhere). If it is a cable issue, it will happen all the time, and frankly, I have only seen these issues in cable runs over 30'. If anyone is looking to make a long run, talk to us as there are fairly inexpensive solutions for that as well.
 
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Sorry, there is no difference in PQ/AQ between an inexpensive HDMI cable (mediabridge, monoprice, BJ, etc.) and an expensive cable (Monster, Audioquest, etc). Been doing this forever. Analog cables are a different story. There are several threads in the "General Home Theater Advice, Tips and Discussion" forum.

S~

Audioquest was the one I was thinking about. I about spit my drink out when I saw how much they cost.
 
I refuse to be drawn into the analog cable discussion, because there is no logic in those discussionns. Kind of like trying to discuss which religion is best.

The last time I got drawn in, people were trashing Belkin cables as being pedestrian and adding color. I was still working at Hewlett-Packard in the Electronic Test and Measurement operations. We were busy building expensive data acquisition systems with spectrum and network analyzers to measure phase shift and inserted losses in systems. We used the standard Belkin coax with BNC connectors (cost about $10/meter) for anything up to about 2 GHz. My position has always been and will continue to be that you need to show me a vector network analyzer plot that indicates phase shifts and frequency mode dropoff or notches before I am going to take you seriously. If you can't measure it, then the effect is in your mind. There is a strong psychological belief that once you have spent a gazillion dollars on that amp and processor, that you really need a thousand dollar cable to get the best out of it. Simply isn't true, but a lot of companies have gotten rich off that delusion.
 
The thing Ive always done with regards to analog audio cables, and this goes back to car stereo days: Keep them away from power cables, at least in parallel (they are OK to cross one another).
 
6. Perform Regular Maintenance:
Screens get dirty over time and will cause loss of contrast and brightness. A quick pass with Windex works wonders.

Never - and I mean NEVER - use Windex or any other regular glass cleaner on your screen. It destroys the anti-glare coating. Only use distilled water or a cleaning fluid specifically designed for television screens, such as this one from Monoprice, and a clean, good-quality microfiber cloth.
 
NEW TIP: (Not a trick) Watch something good on your TV!
True enough. But one person's Masterpiece Theater is another's Wrestlemania XXXV.

I would restate what you say as "Value your viewing time, and select programming that gives you joy."
 
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