Time Warner Cable HD looks like crap on my Samsung

plahoud

I just purchased a Samsung LN-T3242HX television and absolutely loved the picture when I first set it up. I ran right down to the Time Warner office and picked up a HD cable box. I don't want to pay for the DVR service because I plan to set up Media Center and do it myself. Unfortunately they only seem to offer HDMI connections with the DVR box so I had to connect with component. When I set the box up it was clear at first, but I moved my TV to another location in the room and suddenly the picture is horrible, both HD and standard channels. It looks like a low-res signal is being displayed on my TV, all channels have pixelization. In some cases it looks like someone has drawn grid lines across the screen. I've had two technicians here including a supervisor and they are telling me the problem is that I bought a Samsung TV. They are telling me that all Samsungs look like this with Time Warner Cable. Has anyone else experienced this?? I really don't want to go with satelite, but if this is the best TWC can do I'm signing up for DirecTV.

Sykotic

It did look good at one point, correct? Sounds like you got a loose connection or a bad fitting on an extension rg6 your using. Unhook each cable and manually check the inside of the connector make sure the center stinger isnt touching the outer shielding. Make sure every fitting is tight afterwards. Lets see if this corrects your problem. GL

plahoud

Thanks for the info! I tried that but it didn't work. I decided to call Samsung customer service and they suggested I connect my DVD player with the same component cable to see what happens. Low and behold the picture was just as crappy. I can't believe the 3 technicians I had here didn't think to do that or to swap out the cable. I'm going to head over to TWC and have them swap the cable, if that doesn't work I've got an appointment for in-home service with Samsung on Thursday.

paulc

All I can tell you is that the TWC-NYC Manhattan North head end and my Samsung work perfectly together. I have yet to see ANY setup that demonstrates a better picture.

I also have many friends who would spend an hour pouring over an image to pick up the slightest of flaws, then loudly proclaim that it is utter crap. Not saying you are doing this, just that it goes on.

dondada73

I'm TWC in Brooklyn. HD DVR hooked up to my Samsung 40" LCD via component (and 32" Sharp LCD downstairs with non-DVR HD box via component). picture is fine on both. SD channels are well....SD, some looking better than others, HD channels look pretty good, specifically Discovery and Thirteen HD. Normally I'd say leave it up to TWC to come up with any excuse as to why their PQ looks like crap, but if yours was fine at first and then deteriorated after you moved the set, they may have a point....

__________________
Sharp LC32D4U
Samsung LN-S4041D
Toshiba HDA2 HD-DVD player
Sony PS3
Samsung BD-P1200 Blu Ray player
Bose satellites
Klipsch sub
Klipsch center channel
Pioneer receiver
blah blah blah

oh and 1 pissed off wife!

treker

Time Warner tends to look like crap all over

It's just Greg

Equipment:

Hewlett-Packard LC4276N 42-inch LCD 1080p
Panasonic DVD-S53 player w/ 1080p upscaling
SA 8300HD box
HDMI direct into TV inputs from DVD and 8300
TV calibrated w/ Video Essentials (old disk, though)

Anyway, I was going to ask a similar question - glad I found this thread already started. I have pretty much the same issues with TW in Houston, with maybe a few differences. For one, the digital artifacts are not always present; some channels are better than others, and sometimes the same channel looks better on one program vs. another.

The movies I've watched using the DVD player as a source look very good. INHD and the Discovery Channel look great. Some other channels like FSNSW (the Fox regional sports network in my area) look like crap most of the time, with blocky compression noise and sometimes a black or blue outline around medium to high contrast borders. I haven't tried an OTA source because I'm a long way from the tower locations and I don't have a good enough antenna.

I don't know if it's the 8300, the broadcast source or something TW is doing. I'd suspect the TV also if it weren't for the fact that some programming does look good through the same input, even with lots of motion. I don't suspect a cable loss problem; I won't make this long post longer by explaining how I know, but will be happy to elaborate if asked.

I'm thinking that this is normal and is a result of signal processing by TW or the program source, but just thought I'd ask. FWIW, it all looks fine from 15 ft. away - it isn't until I get within a few feet of the set that I start seeing problems.

mertallix

all of your problems are do to the fact that you have no idea how to fix cable , stop being "no it alls" and call the cable company, HDTV and Digital cable is much different from your analog cable you are used to, you cant just run to radio shack and do it yourself, when the cable companys install your HDTV in one room you cant move the box into another room and expect it to work, they hook it up so that wire gets the best signal so that line in the other room can have crap levels all cable companys have specs on what level of db in cable is good untill your tv looks like crap or works funny, so what im trying to say is let the pros handel and you stick to wathing the tv not fixing it

mertallix

READ the instuctions depending on the size of your tv you must view your tv at different amount of ft. away, the bigger the set the further back you must sit, the closer you get the worse it looks, READ people

It's just Greg

Well, you didn't mention what experience you have with all that technical cable stuff, but it looks like you know what you're talking about. Amazing how we get all that stuff from one wire, huh?

Anyway, I mentioned that I tested the cable - let me tell you what I did so that you can let me know if I missed anything.

Long story ahead (and I warned y'all in the first message) - just follow me for a minute or two, 'kay?

First off, this is a fairly new house and it was the first one hooked up in this section. At first I had all kinds of problems, mostly with the cable modem. After a few service calls, I got to the point where they stopped sending paroled felons to my house and real TW people with real TW trucks showed up.

They tested the line to the tap next to my lot (and dug up a lot of my grass, the bastards), and figured out that the problem was upstream from my house and not an interior wiring problem. I wouldn't let them in my front door until they checked the run to my house and verified that the signal was good to that point.

It eventually got to where I was on a first name basis with the regional manager and had three line techs leave me their cell phone number. About half of the techs that came to the house mentioned that they thought the problem might be with the tap feeding my house, and a few parts were replaced over the course of three or four visits - two from the same guy.

I would still have problems from time to time, and I found that if I took the (unlocked) cover off the tap and and tightened up the connection to my house with my trusty 7/16ths wrench , and then gave the service amp a little (well, okay, medium ...) tap with the wrench I would get a great signal again - for a while.

After a bit they finally dug up and replaced the dang thing and it's all been good since.

My incoming signal goes through a 3-way splitter; the -3dB connection goes to the cable modem and the two -7dB connections feed a pair of Radio Shack (yep, you guessed it) 1x4 two-way video amps to push the signal to the interior. The house was wired with RG6 runs and I pulled and inspected all of the wall plates. Never trust the low-bid subcontracters the builder will hire - half the connections almost fell apart when I took the wall plate out.

Toward the end, while I was waiting the standard 3-5 days for a TW visit, I decided to check my interior cable runs for ingress and measure the cable losses to and the signal gain from the amps. I brought home a spectrum analyzer and a signal generator from work (it's great having a good job that lets you do that, right?) ... figured that would be a good way to put a number on things, just so I know.

I terminated all of the unconnected interior cable outlets, as well as the incoming service connector outside the garage, with 75-ohm terminators (from Radio Shack, again, luv those guys! ) and used the spectrum analyzer to scan for any spurious noise. Didn't find anything, but just to check I took off a terminator and keyed the mike on one of the kids' FRS radios and saw a nice bright spike on the analyzer. If there was any sort of problem w/ the house runs of the cable I think I would have seen it.

I used the spectrum analyzer and the signal generator to measure all of the cable losses and they were within spec for RG6 cable. The video amps have adjustable gain, and a typical signal in each room was about -2dB from the incoming signal level measured at the garage.

To wrap all this up and make it short, which I guess I should have in the first place (and maybe used smaller words), I've done my homework pretty well on this. Oh, and yeah - I've heard about that viewing distance thing.

Dang ... and I had my hopes up when I saw that there was a reply in this thread. In other words -



Take your Cheetos and get back in the basement and let the grown-ups talk.

Oh, and did you miss the part where I said that sometimes the same channel will look just fine at different times with different programs? Seems that wouldn't be the case if I had a cable problem.

paulc

Wow, talk about testing! I commend you for going that mile to see where the issue lies.

Small anecdote, a while back I noticed some issues with RoadRunner, not the TV side. They spent a day "tightening up" whatever they needed to at the fiber node feeding my building. Didn't change anything, so they looked at the building wiring and did find a problem 4 floors below me. THAT fixed the RR issue. The INTERESTING thing is that through all of that, the seemed to be no issues with the TV delivery!

Still, PQ can be an area of highly subjective opinion that doesn't relate all that well to reality. My only suggestion is to make your judgement from the position you normally would be watching stuff. AND use good material... few acknowledge that some HD content is so sloppily done that it does look terrible. Look at a DVD to see how your display handles SD content. If it looks great, figure broadcast will look slightly worse, always has, always will. Any differences you see is in the source material and/or transmission, NOT your display.

It's just Greg

Heh ... thanks. I work in an engineering group that does wireless LAN RF development, so we have some pretty nifty tools.

One other thing I did was measure signal levels on the incoming service. The signal degrades as the frequency goes up because the insertion loss (attenuation) of the coax cable goes up with the frequency.

Melo

I have a 50" Samsung DLP that we purchased in Dec 2006. 2 days ago, we traded in our crappy Time Warner Moxi box for their Motorola HD-DVR box. We're using a Monster HDMI cable.

Since getting this "upgraded box", the picture quality now sucks, on both regular channels and HD channels. Plus, there are black bars on the right and left sides of the picture on our REGULAR channels?? I just got back to work after meeting the TW tech at my house. He had no idea why the picture quality was so poor and why the vertical black bars were there. He said he'd have to talk with his supervisor tomorrow and get back to me

Another thing that sucks about this new box is that the guide does not show the logo for each channel...the Moxi box had this which made it easier to spot VH-1, MTV, HBO, etc. However, this downfall is the least of my worries right now.

From what everyone has told me, once we got the HDMI cable and the new Motorola box, our picture would be amazing. This has NOT been the case.....

Any suggestions?

bfdtv

Turn the box off and press menu. Set to 1080i or 720p, as appropriate for your display, and enable 4:3 override set to 480i.

hungfut88

Are you very happy with your HP LCD? I am looking at it on sale from BB this Black Friday? Do you recommend? Do you know of any reviews for it?