Studio 1555 with 1080 monitor - whats the best way of watching SD content?

It doesn't look too great!

 

Thats weird, cleary thats not normal. I'm not sure whats wrong, what are you using to play the DVDs? Are your drivers up to date?

I've watched Nacho Libre in DVD and the quality was great. It shouldn't be pixelated at all, expecially to the quality of those anti piracy ads...

 

Take a picture and post it (thumbnail it via imageshack or something please). It could be nothing, but this I think is the first time I've heard somebody complain about it.

 

Yeah, the drivers are all up to date with those on Dell's support site. But as I say, performance per se isn't an issue really at all. I'm hugely impressed with Call of Duty 4 running at 4x AA and 1280 x 720 resolution (2.4ghz Intel Centrino 2 processor, 4 GB RAM), it just quite bizzarely looks a bit rough around the edges while doing it!

So, here's my City of Men DVD running on the latest version of Windows Media Player:

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/2609/cityofmenwindowsmediapl.png

And my Watchmen Blu-Ray came with a DVD 'digital copy' that you can install to your computer and play via iTunes. It's the same size as the file you actually buy or rent from the iTunes store at 2.2gb:

http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/104/watchmenitunes.png

Also it didn't occur to me before that this could be similar a problem but when playing a Blu-Ray (through the Power DVD software that Dell supply - fully updated) there will occasionally be huge contrasts in picture quality. For instance on Pan's Labryinth I actually remember one of my friend's saying of the little 'Optimum Home' animation before the title menu "that's not blu-ray, that's not even VHS" and he was right, I just played it back now and it looks muggy as anything. But the film itself at 1080p looks stunning. There's also scenes in Planet Earth where it will switch (I can only assume) between shots of different fidelity and will just look like it's going from VHS to blu-ray with the change in shot. unfortunatly, Power DVD doesn't seem to let you print screen, unless anyone knows of a technique to do it?

And similarly, while obviously things never look quite as nice when you lower your desktop resolution a tad, when I put mine down to 720 (and since it's a widescreen monitor that's the next highest level to preserve the aspect ratio) everything just looks pixelated and washed out. And that's 720, as with COD4, a bonafide HD resolution being made to look low res... As it is I'm at 1080 with large icons and IE zoomed in at 115% and looking a tad less sharp than I would like from my shiny new monitor!

Also probably worth pointing out this problem's been with me since I got the Laptop only about a month ago with Vista, and has survived a clean install (of course not forgetting to re-install the drivers!) to Windows 7.

 

It looks normal to me. the higher the resolution of the screen, the more the software will smooth it out. It's like watching standard def television on a HDTV - since you're not watching on a screen at its native resolution, it will almost certainly look bad. The HD video is much closer to its native resolution (if not at its native resolution) so it looks okay.

You could try to help the issue by finding upscaling software, which will actually increase the resolution of the video being outputted to something closer to HD - but I'm not too familiar with what's available for that.

 

Yeah, I understand the principle that any image upscaled is likely to suffer in quality slightly, and if it was only slight it would be fine. And it's not just DVDs, which I'm only using as an example.

Like I say, Call of Duty 4 at 1280 x 720 with 4 x AA looking rough around the edges; actual Blu-Rays like Planet Earth looking like they're on VHS in certain scenes; the desktop itself... It's not like I've never seen a DVD played on a 1080p TV before.

 

ohhhh - if the desktop itself is blurry then that could be a problem. Can you print a screenshot of that and post it?

 

Yeah, I certainly could try but would it work like that? Is a print screen not a copy of what your computer's outputting to the monitor, rather than what your monitor is displaying as such?

Sorry if that's confusing, but say for me looking at a 720 printscreen in 1080 looks nice enough, just obviously half the size because the whole issue is with upscaling.

Anyway I've been tinkering with FFD show and it's made DVDs look a lot better and got a stack new blu-rays that look stunning in 1080 so not so down on it as I was

 

I mean - if when you post the screenshot if it looks blurry to us then there's something wrong with your video card. If you upload something and it looks fine to us, then it's likely your monitor. I'm wondering because as far as I can tell from the screens you uploaded, it looks adequate to me. I'm glad you found some good temporary solution, but if it's a hardware issue then it's best to get that sorted out soon, so you can ask them to replace it or fix it as needed.