Metropol

I've finally taken the plunge and bought a 32" LCD HDTV, which I'm feeding with a Sky+ box. The inbuilt Freeview tuner won't be of any use here for a few more years.

Why do the manufacturers of such sets insist on leaving the "sharpening" setting turned right up, out of the box? The sharpening pixellates everything so badly it looks like it's off YouTube, but seems to be a common factory default, from what has been posted elsewhere.

A few minutes of tinkering (using a jpeg of TCW, burned to DVD) and it now looks considerably better. But I don't understand why they can't put better defaults on the units. Do they want people to think they've bought a pile of crap? Is it some conspiracy to get people to buy Sky HD? I think we should be told.

i actually think it's because without sharpening it looks a bit blurry. maybe the set manufacturers are trying to emulate the sharpness of a smaller crt so the generic consumer thinks the quality of the image is 'better'?

on the subject of sky hd, i'm not too impressed by it. the quality of the image is sharper, but when you're sitting in your living room 3 metres away from the telly you don't really notice it most of the time. sure, some things are crisper, like black on white text. but by and large, just not worth the money in my opinion and the artefacts during fast movement almost negate any benefit in having it in the first place.

I know what you mean there. I downloaded a couple of Planet Earths - a HD-DVD rip and a BBC HD rip and, while it could be the recompression method used, the BBC HD one had far more artefacts. What I like about HDTVs is that even my cheap-ass Evesham (god rest its corporate soul) gives great pictures when hooked up to a computer.

Because they want theirs to look the brightest in the shop. So they have the contrast and sharpness turned up full.

Which looks marvellous when fed by a dodgy RF cable.