Not happy with picture on my new 43" Vizio 4K Ultra HD TV... help?

louweed

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Feb 6, 2015
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Ok newbie Q here: I'm not sure if its the 4K, the Ultra HD or both... but movies like "American Sniper" look like amateur '90s shot VHS movies. its so bad. most movies are deep / rich with vibrant colors but this is just awful! is this what 4K is supposed to look like? Its like really bad 3D. Fyi I have XFINITY but not HD. also i just hooked it up to my Comcast cable box using the Co-ax cable. Was I supposed to use an HDMI cable? Below is the link to the TV i purchased and pics of the ports:

http://

m43-07.jpg


m43.jpg


 
Solution
Hello,

Incase what's been said was confusing. 4k is the cinema standard, while UHD is the consumer standard. 4k is also not just a small difference in resolution, what is required to take advantage of the new UHD displays is HDMI 2.0a, which will be able to feed HDR (High Dynamic Range), among other specs, which in laymans terms means better picture quality than anything ever seen before, in the consumer market.

This is where the new UHD displays shines, over the older FHD TV sets, and this is what will be used to market these. Resolution by itself doesn't mean a whole lot, much like you look closely at your arm, you see small detail you otherwise won't see further away from you. We could easily use Apple's definition of this, which...

Emanuel Elmo

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Mar 21, 2014
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So a few things to clear up. UHD is 3840 pixels × 2160 lines. What you have from vizio and from every tv manufacturer is a fake 4k TV. Meaning that it is NOT 4K but because the resolution is close to it and Entertainment industry wants to make money they tell you "FOR MARKETING REASONS" that it is 4k. I am pretty sure the next TV coming out that will have a actual 4k signal will be marketed at FULL 4K. The same way they did with 1080p to FULL 1080P.

A TV that would have an actual 4K resultion would have 4096 pixels x 2160 lines. So now you know.

Next thing. American Sniper... do you have it in SD or in HD. In other words is it a DVD or a Blu-ray?

If it is a DVD or SD which most of the time resolution for that are 720 pixels X 480 lines would be a reason why it looks like crap.

Even if you have it on blu-ray it will not look as bad but it will still look meh but still much better than a DVD.

Why is this? Your DVD or Blu-ray in terms of resolution is NOT UHD. In order for your content to be displayed on your TV it needs to be up-scaled (or blown up). That means your TV needs to take the resolution of a DVD or a blu-ray and make it into a UHD resolution.

http://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/4k-ultra-hd-uhd-vs-1080p-full-hd-tvs-and-upscaling-compared

This website also has a scale to show you how much larger your tv is going to be trying to make your content to display is correctly.

But at the end of the day, your TV is fine. You want to see those awesome crisp images, pipe some UHD content to it and you will be fine.
 
Hello,

Incase what's been said was confusing. 4k is the cinema standard, while UHD is the consumer standard. 4k is also not just a small difference in resolution, what is required to take advantage of the new UHD displays is HDMI 2.0a, which will be able to feed HDR (High Dynamic Range), among other specs, which in laymans terms means better picture quality than anything ever seen before, in the consumer market.

This is where the new UHD displays shines, over the older FHD TV sets, and this is what will be used to market these. Resolution by itself doesn't mean a whole lot, much like you look closely at your arm, you see small detail you otherwise won't see further away from you. We could easily use Apple's definition of this, which in short is just called Retina Density. You're actually going to be able to see a change over older UHD sets, which is very exciting to say the least.

Like mentioned above, it upscales, as there's no consumer UHD content available, that actually looks good. And by that I mean that FHD Blu-rays still beat the different UHD streamers.

Before we can determine what's wrong with what you're seeing, first we're going to need a lot more information. However, as a starting point, always change the default aspect ratio to not overscan, 99% of the times TV's ship with a factory setting that's set to 16:9. This means that it's overscanning, and you need to use Screen Fit, or Just Scan, or Dot by Dot, TV manufacturers name this differently, but you should make sure it's not overscanning. Even a 5% overscan, is enough to completely get rid of small detail, worst is that's it's going to soften the whole image. Incase I explained it poorly, for the best image without profssionally calibrating:


Picture Preset: Movie/Cinema/Theater

Sharpness: 0 (1 if 0 creates artifacts)

All "Dynamic" or other weird options that should make no sense to you: OFF


This will ensure best picture quality possible, again, without calibrating it, which is expensive.




All the best!
 
Solution
The info above is great but the first thing you have to do us connect your cable box with HDMI. Even if it is not an HD box it will be way better. You will be feeding the set a digital video signal.
Second thing is get an HD box.
An issue all UHD sets have is that there is almost no 4k to watch so the set has to up convert even 1080p (and you are inputing 480i through your coax connection). The quality of this up conversion is a big factor in the price so cheaper set use the cheapest ICs and the picture can be horrific.
 
If you don't have an HD source, this new TV will not look any better than a 10 year old 720 HD set.

Is the movie you are watching on BluRay? DVD? Movie Channel? Edited for TV? Either way, if you don't have HD channels, you will find things that look pretty bad. Upgrade your service to HD or get a BluRay player to watch movies on with it. If you don't, you may as well return the TV.
 

louweed

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Feb 6, 2015
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4,560
wow just logged on and reading all the responses. thank you guys for all your input thus far. i'm gonna work on getting this thing up to par this week. sounds like w/o the Xfinity HD service i am SOL?
 


Correct, unless you feed the TV an HD source, it will look pretty bad. Think of it as buying a $5,000 set of speakers and then playing a scratched record through them using a $20 record player, then asking why the speakers don't make the record sound good. You won't get any use out of your good equipment till you match it with a good source. A basic HD service is pretty much 0 cost over non-HD these days anyway. If you want to see what your new TV can do, that's what you need, as well as maybe get a BluRay player or run some HD Netflix movies through it.