After a little research, on Monday I bought a Sharp LC-32GA5U 32" LCD TV. So far, I'm fairly happy with it. It looks cool in my living room, and I'm sure it has a lot of potential but I'm not having a lot of luck getting a super picture out of it.
Right now I'm using a Sony PS2 30001R for my DVD player. It's an older model, so I don't think it supports progressive scan for DVD playback. I purchased a component video cable for the PS2 off of eBay and it arrived yesterday. I hooked it up and well, the picture is less than stellar.
First of all, I set the PS2 in both the setup menu (The one you get when you fire it up without a disc in it) and the in movie "PS2" setup to 16:9 mode. I grabbed one of my favorite movies, Casino. I went into the DVD setup menu on the PS2 and changed it from 4:3 to 16:9. I was expecting to be blown away but I'm actually kind of annoyed with it so far.
First off, there's therse vertical lines running down the length of the picture. Probably about 3/4 - 1" apart going all across the picture. They are very light and kind of curved, but they are there and are REALLY annoying. I'm not sure what would cause this, so I was wondering if anyone had any ideas?
Second issue is that I now have a 16:9 TV, and a DVD player set to 16:9. The problem I'm running into is that I still have the "View Mode" menu that I can use and there's 4 options (Side bar, Stretch, Zoom, and Smart Stretch.) I thought when I had the 16:9 TV and the DVD player set this way the TV would automatically pick the best mode. I can pick all of the modes but I can't decide what looks best. I think they all have something that's not right. Eitehr charachters look stretched out, or I'm watching a square image in the center of my TV with side bars all around it. What's the deal?
I'm not going to even mention how bad SD television looks coming out of my digital cable box. Hopefully when Comcast gets here and delivers my HD PVR some of that will be resovled.