I just got my 46xbr4 in this weekend. I used the AVIA DVD to calibrate my set but there is one thing that I noticed that kind of bothered me and I am not sure if its a big deal or not. When in a 1080i program, there is a noticeable pixelization (sp?) around certain objects. For example, during a football game the scoreboard image will have some noticeable pixels around the image. Same on some objects in the screen.

I am not sure if this is a major deal or not. I should mention that I am obtaining this signal via a coax over my cable. I don't have an HD source via HDMI. Not sure if that has something to do with it as well.

Any help or info would be greatly appreciated.

Greetings

Lack of bandwidth. Nothing to do with the TV.

Nothing short of the infusion of trillions of dollars to upgrade the entire broadcast infrastructure would fix this.

Regards

Great thanks for the reply.

Yeah it sounds like your cable company compressing the signal to hell.

For my own knowledge, would that be fixed if I had an HD box inline before the TV? Do the provided boxes offer some sort of "special" decompression of the signal or splitting of the signal?

I used the old AVIA DVD (1999), I was comtemplating getting the newest version assuming there were more test patterns geared toward LCD's. Not sure if that is a correct assumption or not. Anyone have any opinions on this?

For my own knowledge, would that be fixed if I had an HD box inline before the TV? Do the provided boxes offer some sort of "special" decompression of the signal or splitting of the signal?First, despite the tendency for some folks to blame cable compression for everything, you need to know that there is a lot less of that going on than some like to maintain.

There are often lots of issues in getting live sports to you and all too often you end up seeing the artifacts of a less than perfect system. Having a HD cable box inline before the TV will not change the situation. Problems with compression are with the compression, there is nothing the decompression can do about it. There are some "high end" video processors that can take out some of the artifacts (mostly mosquito noise), but probably not the type of pixelation that you refer to. Another factor may be the settings on your TV which may, in the name of "sharpness" or whatever, exaggerate these artifacts. You really can't eliminate these problems - but you may be able to make them less objectionable.

Thanks for the reply. I am somewhat new to the world of HDTV/LCD's and this helps to understand things better. I agree, settings could be a factor. I really can afford paying $400 to have it professionally calibrated, but I think with time, and research I'll find the right settings. I already noticed a little improvement with just changing some of the basic menu options around. I looked on this forum for people's configs to use a comparison, but allot of them are using an HDMI source, and since I have none its tough.

Regardless its still 100x's better than what I had for a TV(tube) before......

Thanks again for all your help.
I hate posting questions that a little research could answer but I was stuck.