Well, for quite some time I’ve been having some noise lines appear on the screen – primarily with red, but it appeared that all 3 tubes were affected. I wondered if this was the projector or the signal. Having recently played around with checking the grayscale – it was pretty obvious my line problem was getting more serious – the lines were pretty obvious during the test patterns. Normal video material was mostly ok, but some movies such as The Incredibles really showed the problem in some scenes.
My HDTV source is a satellite box (starchoice) and it didn’t appear to have the same problem, but with the amount of MPEG2 compression artifacts it is hard to be certain that there isn’t a problem. Of course if it was my source – then it might be my DVD player, or my quadscan, or the cables.. so many items in the signal path that I couldn’t easily isolate.
I had figured that using the transcoder I have plus my ‘extra’ Sony DVD player [DVP-NS50P] running in progressive mode I could bypass the quadscan. This was relatively easy to try out, and it seemed not to have any problems – other than the somewhat questionable transcoding. No lines.
I then tried the Sony DVD player via SVideo to the quadscan, and again – no issue. Hooking up the Toshiba DVD player [SD-2109] via SVideo instead of my usual component connection the lines also seem to go away. This is an interesting A/B comparison since the Toshiba has both outputs active in parallel, so I can switch between the two outputs and verify that the signal is cleaner on one than the other.
The Toshiba seems to have a very subtle noise in the signal (almost like a ground loop hum) that I don’t see with the Sony. While the trusty 2109 has served me very well for many years, maybe its time to retire it. The 2109 was a great (quality) player, but at this point in time it seems like the (cheap) Sony has an edge on image quality.
After digging around to remove the 2109 from the rack (what a mess back there) – and getting the Sony in place – it appears that with component input I still have the same noise problem. The Sony SVideo is still cleaner than the Toshiba – so I’ll stick with it for a while. The component cables may be the problem, but it may also be the quadscan’s ability to process component input.