unhandledexception.net

I got myself a nice little present on Black Friday, which to get I had to wait in the wee hours in the morning in Renton’s Fry’s. I got the LG Scarlet (52LG60) for $1200. Not bad Anyway, so this is like the obligatory “show and tell” post…

One of the things I wanted to do with that TV was hook up an eventual media center PC. Now all I have on it is my Macbook Pro

So, First thing I tried hooking it up through VGA with an old monitor cable which wasn’t great, until my Monoprice order arrived. In it was a VGA+Audio cable along with a DVI-to-HDMI cable. Great, let’s try HDMI. I was expecting a crystal-clear picture, but that’s not what I got. The picture had a reduced color depth, super high contrast and the text was bleeding. So, I tried different things, including disabling ClearType which made it worse, so here’s what worked.

Display settings

Set resolution to 1920×1080 at 59Hz. You might have to click the Force button on the ATI settings dialog. The 59Hz part Intrigues me. If I pick 60Hz on HDMI, the TV says “Invalid Format” and on VGA it shrinks the picture to 4:3 aspect ratio, even if 1920×1080 is widescreen.

Set the overscan to MAX. If you don’t, you won’t get 1:1 pixel ratio, which means the image will be resized. You DON’T want that.

TV

Selecting overscan will hide the edges. Set the aspect ratio to Just Scan. Just Scan is just fancy terminology for 1:1.

Disable the variety of picture enhancements. They mess around with the color depth. Video looks good, but your desktop won’t. I do leave the intelligent sensor ON.

This improved the picture quite a bit, although it’s still not to my liking.

The vertical lines seem OK, the horizontal ones, not so much…

The “info” bar and input list:

The I/O Panel

My biggest complaint is the lack of analog audio out, it only has digital RCA and optical audio out. I don’t have a surround system yet, just a bookshelf stereo system, and I don’t care much for them.

So, I had to get this thing from GefenTV. Cost me around $70. The only problem is that it won’t decode dolby, just LPCM. They just came out with this guy that will do Dolby. I might just get it eventually.

And here’s my stuck pixel, located around the center of the screen. As you see, the green pixel is black (always ON), so the effect of this is that the pixel is magenta. I’ll try running one of the tools that displays white snow. I’m a hesitant about using a pencil or eraser on it. I don’t want a dent on the surface.

And here’s how the logo looks It’s quite nice actually, but if the LEDs annoy you there’s an on-screen option to turn it off. In case you are wonering, it is totally transparent, behind is the wall (you can see the texture on the wall).