Pioneer PDP-5010FD HDMI input picture is horrible! Help please!

I have had the set for about a month. I had wires, including an HDMI cable, run in the wall to a closet when we built the house, but I have been watching Cablevision (Connecticut) HD over component video until now. When I connected the cable box (SA 8300 HD DVR) through the HDMI cable, the picture was terribly pixellated. Just to be clear, this is not a subtle problem, it is an obvious and horrible picture problem. I tried all 4 HDMI inputs, and bought a brand new cable to check if the cable was the problem. (The first cable was from bluejeans cable, around 20 feet long, the second was from radio shack, 12 feet long.)

When my xbox360 is connected via the HDMI inputs, the picture is great, as long as the HDMI option is set to PC and not video. Set to video, it is the same pixellated picture as described above.

I had a service tech from Cablevision out here today and he checked the signal on the cable, and said it was fine. I also have tried 2 cable boxes, the first was the 8300 described above which I just received in the mail from cablevision, and the second was the old SA 4250 HD box I was using before.

I called pioneer, and they said it sounded like I need to have a service rep look at it. Before I make that call, does anyone have any advice? Help, please!?!

Can anyone shed any light on the difference between the PC setting and Video setting for the HDMI input? What do these settings change? And would the xbox 360 normally be displayed on the video setting? I notice that the TV shows "1080p" when the xbox is connected to the hdmi and hdmi is set on video, which it doesn't do when connected on PC setting. Does this mean anything?

Wow, I am really confused by this now.

I had pioneer send a service guy out to look at my TV, and he swore up and down that there was nothing wrong with the set. I came home after the pioneer service call to find that my xbox hdmi port was broken, physically. I am pretty sure they just manhandled it while testing but it made me wonder if the xbox hdmi was bad to start, so I sent it back to microsoft for repair (hopefully a free warranty repair).

I bought a HD-DVD player (now obsolete!) just to test the hdmi connection and found that all the hdmi ports work great with the HD DVD. So after speaking some more with cablevision support, which was not helpful, I went to the local cablevision outlet and swapped out the DVR for a new one. I plugged it in tonight, and it seemed to work well, with a good picture. But, not being satisfied, I went to the HD DVR box picture format setting, which was set on fixed, and changed it to HDMI/DVI, which is what I was told it should be set on, and the picture instantly went back to pixellated like before, and no change of settings can bring it back.

The only notable findings are that under the 480p and 480i output settings, the picture looks normal, but not in 720p or 1080i.

Can anyone help me out here? Please? Thanks

No luck on finding a hard reset of the DVR.

I had a "senior service technician" from cablevision come out today. I told him everything I had done to troubleshoot the issue, and he made a 20 second phone call and informed me that the explorer 8300 does not support 1080i output. I pointed out that the 1080i picture using the component cables was fine. He was not swayed by this. I didn't really want to discuss or argue with him further, since he didn't really seem to know what he was talking about, and couldn't explain it any better. If he is correct, the cablevision SA 8300 dvr does not support 1080i (or 720p) via the HDMI connector, even though it supports these formats via component connectors.

I am going to try to get someone who knows what they are talking about from cablevision on the phone to confirm or deny this, but it sounds ridiculous to me. Then I will swap the cable box one last time. Argh.

Can someone please please please provide some input on this problem? I am desperate. I have now tried 5 different cable boxes (4 SA9300 HD DVRs, 1 SA 4250 HD cable box) and I get the same problem with all of them. The component cable picture is perfect, but the hdmi picture is horrible, I think now the term is "sparkles" everywhere.

I bought a 6 foot 24 AWG hdmi 1.3a cat 2 cable from monoprice, to see if my other cables were too long or low quality to carry the hdmi signal from the cable box. The result was the same bad picture.

And just a reminder, the 1080p signal from my toshiba A35 HD-DVD is perfect over the longer cables I already have.

There are 4 possible explanations that I can think of:

1) EVERY one of the 5 cable boxes I have tried have defective HDMI outputs, if I could just get one that works I would be fine
2) Cablevision does not support HDMI output, but they just don't know enough to tell me
3) There is some problem with my TV (Pio 5010FD) even though the pioneer service tech has checked it out and says it is fine, and the HD DVD picture is perfect)
4) The cablevision boxes have a very low signal strength which causes the problem (I am hypothesizing this since I have read that long HDMI cable runs also result in "sparkles" due to signal loss over long runs)

Can anyone tell me which they think is likely, and why, or offer another explanation?

If the problem is number 4, would a hdmi repeater or equalizer possibly fix it? And if so, can you recommend a good one, since there are million of them and none have many reviews.

I am ready to take a gun to the TV, Elvis style, at this point. Luckily I don't own a gun. More probable is I will dump cablevision and try FIOS if available or direct TV, although I really like cablevision in general and there is no guarantee that another provider would not have the same issue for me.

Thank you, a million thanks for your reply!!

The picture problem is obvious, not a subtle thing when up close. It is totally unwatchable.

Return the TV? That would assume there is a problem with the HDMI inputs on the TV. But, if that were the case, why would my HD DVD player work perfectly?

There are 4 hdmi ports on the TV, they all behave exactly the same.

I will check the power mode.

I know there is not a big difference between hdmi and component in terms of picture quality, but nonetheless, I want the TV that I spent a lot of money on to work properly (not that I am assuming the TV is the problem at this point). Also, there are only 2 component video inputs on the back, and one on the side, so if I input multiple sources (DVD, VCR(for the kids old tapes), xbox, and cable box) I have to use the side port which looks bad, and I don't have enough ports. I know I can buy an AVR to solve the number of ports problem, but I would like to fix this first.

Problem solved, and the answer is...

The TV was the problem.

Pioneer sent a tech with a new main board for the TV, they replaced it, problem solved.

So much for logical troubleshooting since the HD DVD player with HDMI worked fine but the cable box and xbox did not with HDMI.