pswii60 said:
- Picture quality isn't anywhere near as good as my built-in Freeview TV (Toshiba 32WLT66), it seems 'out of focus', a very soft picture and it's a shame it doesn't appear to use the PS3's excellent DVD upscaling engine (perhaps to reduce power consumption / fans, but the option would be nice). Luckily not a problem as I only intend to use this to playback recorded content, and not to watch live TV.
You might have to check both your TV and the PS3 settings on this one. Firstly, with that particular Toshiba model, sharpness has to be as low as it can go. This is -50. It's not actually negative sharpness, it's
zero sharpness.
The way sharpness is applied to the signal may be different when it comes to SD/HD on your display. I'm not sure, but it may be adding sharpness before scaling rather than after having been scaled, which would give SD/HD inputs a different look, even if it's the same material.
Photos taken from a 32WLT66 a while back:
Sharpness +50:
Stupid amounts of ringing.
Sharpness 0:
Still far too much ringing around the edges of things, dark shadows around text, colour definition is lost. (look at the blue text inside the yellow bar it's too dark) Why they call this 0 I'll never know.
Sharpness -50:
So much better the image as it's supposed to look without artificial sharpening.
The other thing you'll have to check is the PS3's settings. When they added the support for PlayTV a while back, they added the ability to use Noise Reduction feature on files stored on the PS3 hard drive rather than just DVDs. If I remember correctly there's both DNR (grain reduction) and MPEG NR (block noise reduction) both of which basically just end up blurring the image. DNR smears the image as it moves around in an attempt to hide grain, and MPEG NR simply blurs the image like it's running at a lower resolution. These were enabled by default on my system after the update, so that may be the case with yours as well. Turn them off and the image should look a lot better. (on the XMB videos you hit triangle when it's playing to get to the options, I don't know about PlayTV)
pswii60 said:
- NO series link. OK, so I know only BBC and ITV have actually got their Freeview act together on this anyway, but still. Yes, you can set it to record 'weekly' for x number of times, which is fine if: 1) you know how many episodes are in the series and 2) if the programme is going to be on at the same time each week. But, many times this isn't the case. The Apprentice shifted to another day for a couple of weeks this year for example, sometime football coverage delays a programme, and programmes like The Restaurant are on at funny times, with two episodes in a week, or if you wanted to record the X Factor, the show varies in length and starting time every week. Therefore, Series Link is ESSENTIAL. And I just hope it is possible for them to add this feature in the future, and it isn't missing due to hardware limitations or something. Just seems strange that it isn't there on day one.
Well you don't actually want Freeview's series link functionality, it's pretty damn awful. The PS3 should have been able to do what Topfield PVRs do, however, which is to create searches based on the EPG data. E.g. set up a search for ________ on Thursday between 9pm and 11pm on all channels etc.
This works much better than the Freeview series link functionality, though it does have the drawback of potentially duplicating episodes if you don't set it up right. (e.g. if you set it to search all days of the week and the channel broadcasts the same episode again another time)
There's no reason the PS3 shouldn't have been able to have this kind of functionality as it's just simple saved searches on the EPG data that get applied whenever it's updated.
As the serieslink functionality does now broadcast episode names, it could be taken one step further and avoid repeats as long as that info is being broadcast. (channels are very inconsistent about it)
Danj said:
Well of course, the big minus with this thing is that it is Freeview and Freeview is mostly pants in comparison to what's available on Sky Digital. It's a pity Sky is so anal-retentive about their platform and won't make CAMs available for it.
Well Freeview is actually higher bitrate on a lot of the channels that it shares with Sky. Sky is all about the number of channels they can get rather than the quality of them, which is ridiculous when you're having to pay for it.
The biggest problem with Freeview is that films on most channels are often cropped and not shown in their original aspect ratio. The only channel that consistently shows films in their OAR seems to be Film4. Most channels seem to crop 2.35:1 films to 16:9 and I've even seen some older 2.35:1 films cropped to 4:3.
Yes, I'm a cheapskate that would rather wait for a film to appear on TV than buy it on DVD. If it's something I've seen and really enjoyed (so I'd watch it again) then I consider picking it up on Blu-Ray.
