Very poor upscaling on x85 TV

[jonny_guitar]

I went to John Lewis earlier, and was very dissappointed with the picture quality on the x85.  I asked for the remote and spent about 15 mins cycling through the channels.  

The FreeviewHD channels were terrible.  The Freeview channels that weren't HD were unwatchable.

In case you're wondering the signal strength was good - The problems were not related to lossy breakup - just very very grainy.

Seems weird to me that 720 on an 4k is really so bad... I also checked the colour tones and display modes in the settings menu but nothing would improve it.

The website says this about the x85 "everything's upscaled beautifully with the powerful processing engine". Nonsense!  

I'm interested in the new 2015 models and specifically the 65" x85c. I would like to know if there is a superior chipset in the 2015 models that would improve the upscaling over the older model I saw earlier today.

Jonny

[mosquiteki]

it is never good for the 720p upscaling to 4k, the picture is stretched

[Anonymous]

Hi

Upscale a poor video quality (in Freebies Sd broadcasts) will only magnify the imperfections of the video.

An old programming saying: garbage in = garbage out

Cheers

[alex30]

Hi,

This is precisely why I chose to stay with aa Full HD TV rather than an Ultra (4K) Definition TV.

The problem is that any standard definition TV has roughly half a million pixels on it's screen. This fits with a standard definition signal which containes half a million pixels worth of information. The result is the screen is filled without any guesswork. Of course , if the screen is large then so are the pixels and this leads to blur.

A Full HD TV has roughly two million pixels and is designed to match a Full HD signal but if you feed it a standard definition signal then it is only receiving a quarter of the pixel count and has to fill in the blanks by a best guess process called upscaling. At the end of the day this is only an approximation and errors occcur which impact on picture quality. 

Go one step further to 4K and the screen has roughly eight million pixels. This means that a standard definition signal is only supplying a sixteenth of the required information to fill the screen and the TV has to guess the rest. Enen for a Full HD signal there is only a quarter of the information present. For this reason Ultra HD TV's are really at their best when displaying 4K content and can be very ropey when displaying standard definition.

However some are better than others but I would hazard a guess that you will not find one that handles SD very well. It just sems too big an ask.