I understand that sharpness adds artifacts to the image to give the illusion of a sharper picture, however, I was curious whether or not it's recommended to still leave the sharpness setting turned off when viewing non-native content, for example a 720p broadcast or image on my 1080p set. Due to the upscaling, the picture ends up looking blurrier, would you guys recommend turning up the sharpness from 0 in this situation?

Greetings

If the source material is poor ... you do what you have to do to make it watchable. There is no general blanket statement.

Calibrated sets have the sharpness set at the correct spot for the good stuff. All bets are off for crappy stuff.

regards

Thanks for the help. What's the best way to go about calibrating sharpness? I have the AVS HD calibration HD-DVD from this site and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking out for in the sharpness test.

Greetings

Increase to max until you see bright glow along black lines. Back off until the glow goes away.

regards

Spartan_0003 -- You say that 720p broadcasts look "blurry". I find that strange, but it depends on your TV service provider and whether or not you have HD service.

However, a lot depends on the broadcast station, too. Some stations actually scale up a poor quality SDTV (480i) on their HDTV (720p/1080i) channels - that can look blurry on the big screen. If that is happening, then you are at the mercy of their source material and the quality of their scaling hardware. I find that 1080i and 720p material that was shot with HD cameras look very sharp on my 1080p PJ & 106" screen.

As Michael TLV said, crappy source material will look even worse, and there is nothing you can do about it (except watch it on a small TV set). Programs that look only so-so on my 32" HDTV are really bad at 106" (therefore, I take my glasses off to blur the image even more:p).

That's funny. when I had my Sony XBR970 (tube TV), I selected 720p on my cable box and the picture looked softer and even blurry at times during fast moving moments (like watching sports). But when I selected 1080i, I didn't have that same issue. Probably a cable box issue.

I understand that sharpness adds artifacts to the image to give the illusion of a sharper picture, however, I was curious whether or not it's recommended to still leave the sharpness setting turned off when viewing non-native content, for example a 720p broadcast or image on my 1080p set. Due to the upscaling, the picture ends up looking blurrier, would you guys recommend turning up the sharpness from 0 in this situation?

If the sharpness setting is too low the picture will be too soft. I like to see the sharpness control as helping you see the detail that you would see anyway if you simply sit closer, it's only obscuring detail when it's set too high. I don't like it that videophiles make it sound like it's simply evil, end of story. Anyway, that's why I think sharpness should be set based upon where you sit and not putting your eyeball up on the screen (dve would have you put your eyeball up to the screen). If you can't see the halos from where you sit, then you're making the picture look sharper without introducing visible artifacts.

Anyway I think the real problem is that 720p doesn't compress as well as 1080i, especially since the primitive mpeg2 is used for broadcast and the bitrate is relatively low compared to blu-ray. I don't think it's just the scaler at fault here. 720p should still look like a big step up from sd channels since it does have a higher bitrate, and no need for deinterlacing. Another reason why I don't think it's the scaler is because I play video games at 720p (nearly all of the ps3 and 360 games are either 720p or 540p) on a 1080p set and they look crisp despite the fact that the scaler fails just about every test that tvblink has for upconversion!

That's funny. when I had my Sony XBR970 (tube TV), I selected 720p on my cable box and the picture looked softer and even blurry at times during fast moving moments (like watching sports). But when I selected 1080i, I didn't have that same issue. Probably a cable box issue.

1080i is the native res. for that tv, so there was less conversion going on.