Why does some cartoons look so "blurry" on LED TVs?

I just finally got rid of my wonderful Samsung 32" CRT TV and "upgraded" to a Samsung 40" LED TV. The picture quality on the CRT TV was excellent but it was heavy and using a lot of electricity (plus my daughter wanted to get Netflix).

Our family watches a lot of Spongebob so we're used to what it looks like (at least on a CRT TV) and I couldn't help but notice that in general the picture looked kind of blurry on the new LED TV. Now I don't know if "blurry" is the right word but the black outlines were not very solid or distinctive and on closer inspection there seemed to be white streaks moving throughout black lines making the outline definition much less pronounced than on the CRT TV. There was also some noticeable pixelation in the solid colored areas surrounding the black outlines, similar to a low resolution picture or graphic. Is this normal or is this vary from cartoon to cartoon?

 

Are you watching from DVD or from broadcast TV? I know when I first upgraded from a CRT to a flat screen everything on cable looked crappy (except for the few high-def channels I could get).
Some of it may come down to properly calibrating your new TV. And a lot depends on the original source - check out some of the remastered Disney DVDs if you want to see some great looking animation.

 

Standard def or HD? Cable or satellite? Or DVD or Blu-ray?

What I see from standard-def DVDs played back on a Blu-ray player look fine, but I'm using the player to do the up-rezzing (to 1080) rather than the TV set. It's a good question as to which looks better -- the TV or the player -- but the reality is that a modern set can't do standard-def very well. When you up-rez the material to HD, then you have a chance it'll look OK, but there are inevitably artifacts depending on how well (or badly) the up-rezzing is done.

 

I think it's just a matter of getting used to now being able to see the differences between source quality which I hadn't really noticed with my old CRT TV.

 

Must be looking at standard def which would look better on the old CRT. Have you upgraded to HD cable?

 

This may prove of use - perhaps the broadcaster is not using a good source and is trying to compensate.

Take a look at this comparison of two different masterings of Gullivers Travels. One has been softened to 'clean up' the image, but the other retains far more detail.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews44/gullivers_travels_blu-ray.htm

 

It's amazing that any professional working on the "cleaned up" version would actually think that what they were doing was improving the image, though I guess that just as with music some people are more obsessed with noise and they'd rather scrub the life out of something to make it look and/or sound clean, not noticing that along with the noise they're removing a lot of wanted detail.

 

That review mentions that neither blu ray looks as good as the Hal Roach Studios / Image DVD. Has anyone here seen that DVD and can comment on it?

Derek

 

Wow what a difference.

 

Not sure if this will help in this particular case, but since it's a Samsung, it's important to turn Auto Motion Plus completely off, or at most set to 'clear'. The motion interpolation causes more problems than it pretends to solve.

 

Yes we have Xfinity HD Cable.

 

I would call your cable provider and have them come out and check your system and settings.

 

HDTV looks just fine on my desktop LCD display, so you can get a good picture on an LCD/LED set. Nickelodeon is certainly available in HD, make sure you're watching the HD channel and not the SD channel. The HD channels are usually numbered much higher, like "Channel 10" for SD and "Channel 510" for HD.

 

Keep in mind too, that Spongebob was an SD show for most of its life (all the way to 2009, it looks like), so whatever Nick is running from those years is surely just upscaled. Could just be that they don't do a very good job of it.

 

Video on 60-inch LED looks very sharp if it's a good HD source.

 

Maybe your new tv is so much better it's showing the flaws in the broadcast. Honestly, I've ALWAYS found that the one thing that looks good in HD is cartoons! They really pop.

 

Cartoons originally animated and stuck in SD resolution look fairly terrible on modern Hi-Def displays.

 

The first season is also fairly outdated animation wise as well.