All posts by F Farrar
Below are all of F Farrar's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.F
Crystal Palace (Greater London, England) Full Freeview transmitWednesday 7 March 2012 12:26PM
Camberley
Graham: Except for the higher areas towards Bagshot; Reception in most of Camberley is now much better from the Hannington transmitter even though MUXs ARQA & ARQB remain power-restricted until 18th April. Of course, if you only have an aerial pointing towards London, it is worth waiting for switchover completion at Crystal Palace to see if signals become adequate on all MUXs.
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F
Crystal Palace (Greater London, England) Full Freeview transmitWednesday 7 March 2012 6:36PM
Camberley
Mike Dimmick; Despite what the predictors suggest, I do not know anywhere in Camberley that can even detect that the Midhurst transmitter even exists - probably because the intervening topography. Since the same applies to the Rowridge transmitter, Crystal Palace will probably be OK after switchover is completed. However, Hannington is fine right now even with occasional glitches from two temporarily low-power MUXs.
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Jb38 I suspect most people find the image on flat-panel TVs less lively because they do not have the problems inherent to CRT TVs such as slight size-change with brightness, blurred peak whites, poorly focussed corners, indifferent vertical & horizontal linearity, iffy grey-scale consistency, inaccurate & less stable colour-tracking, relatively low definition and so on. Although these are not major issues with more recent and better CRT TVs; nevertheless they still exist and can surprisingly contribute to an apparently livelier, deeper looking image until you get used to the tecnically much superior but subjectively blander image of most decent flat-screen TVs. It is a bit like preferring deeply flawed Vinyl to less flawed CDs.
It is also true that greater viewing pleasure is obtained by much larger displays with flat-screen TVs. I would suggest the largest that doesn't look overwhelming in its setting - and this is because the absence of "liney-ness" & inherent deficiencies that limit CRT TVs.
The major problem with flat screen TVs of even the highest standard/price is the impossibility of squeezing reasonable in-built sound from cabinets a couple of centimeters deep containing tiny speakers formerly found only in small portable radios and facing in any direction except towards the viewer. Sadly, this is even worse with recent LED-lit models which can be (and are) made even less deep. This can at least be resolved with "sound bars" or more physically intrusive "Home Cinema" systems.
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jb38. The energy efficiency of comparable LED lit screens is very susbstantially better than with CC illumination. When they first appeared, the quoted reliability was however worse, but has exceeded it now. However, the technology is as yet not as well refined and the LED backlight/LCD picture-element types often suffer with difficulty in achieving a true reference white colour - perhaps because LED doping/filtering technology has not has had as long as the phosphors in CC illuminators to mature. The net result is that whites on LED sets often look a slightly blueish "Persil White" rather than the correct fresh milk colour.
Most flat screen TVs are supplied with default settings which do them no favours - usually giving pictures on the gaudy side that look good in the shop. They also have a multiplicity of user settings and optimising adjustements that most users do not understand and are not competent to use. My own LG stores 161 individual picture settings for each input and within that for each resolution of signal source and then automatically applies them as appropriate. However it looked dreadful on the factory settings and this capability was miserably described in the user documentation such that few without some technical expertise and knowledge of video parameters could have successfully set the thing up to do its best. The average user has to rely on an "idiot-guide/procedure" which will achieve just passable results & is unlikely to realise that he can separately optimise it for SD, HD, DVD & BluRay etc.
Most CRT TVs were just internally set up to do the best they could with the TV signal and applied this to everything with results that often looked better - or more correctly, nicer.
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Steve Latham. If things are OK most of the time, your signal is probably on the edge & just using a 15 to 20dB signal preamp will probably make enough difference for a small price. Try Maplin etc. for preamp.
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Monday 5 March 2012 5:31PM
Camberley
As a rider relating to the lack of information etc. leading to people buying new equipment:
Since if reception fails anywhere, there seems to be no way of directly reporting this; I fail to see how DUK can state Transmitters are working normally. Surely they can only report that as far as they are aware nothing has been done which has changed reception.
The clue is "as far as they are aware" since there seems no possible way in which they could be aware if reception had changed. Maybe if they had stated that DTV reception COULD be affected during the lead-up to final switchover we would have been satisfied?