Goremonger,
I'm sorry to hear that our Tech Support didn't address your issues. Hopefully I can shed a little light on some of these issues and help find a solution to these issues.
A regular DVD player and basic cable may cause some blurriness and.. well, let's say "lack of clarity" since the incoming signal is 480 lines of resolution being shown on 768 lines of resolution. So the jump in resolution means that the television's processing does have to "guess" or more accurately, use mathmatical algorhythms to fill the lines of resolution NOT represented by the incoming 480 lines of your SD signal. As a result, you'll see some artifacting - probably more in letters and numbers than anything else.
The XBox should be a different story, since you're able to output at a higher resolution and you're using a digital HDMI HD signal as an input source. First things first on that, have you bumped up your resolution on the XBox to take advantage of the HD signal it's capable of producing?
I apologize for the tech who gave you the bit about "low quality cables". HDMI cables either pass data or they don't - 0's and 1's don't degrade with the quality of cable; while there are some things that could go wrong, resulting picture quality is not one of them.
Was your older WEGA HD, or SD? If it's SD, that's probably why the PQ looks better - the XBox is probably sending a SD signal, which looks great on a SD panel, and not so much on HD until you go into your options and up the resolution a little.
The flashing is also usually a result of a picture signal starting and stopping. In most cases, it just means that the television is receiving intermittent picture signals from the souce. So if you load a DVD, it may be sending a dormant signal - enough to not pop on the "Check cable" warning, but not sending any picture either. It's somewhat normal on all panels for the symptoms you describe if the DVD player is sending intermittent signals.
I would hope you wouldn't feel ripped off, so if there's something I can do to help you in the meantime, please let me know.
--HDTech
I just got off of the phone with Samsung Tech support and well I kinda feel ripped off. I bought this TV after seeing my friends unit in action and also based on the experiences in the past with Samsung, and the guy on the phone pretty much told me that this was my problem not Samsungs...
First off, I currently have an Xbox 360, Magnavox DVD player and Basic Cable (Not High Def) hooked to the unit. On all three of these there appears to be multiple shadows behind objects like a cheesy 3D effect. Its not so noticeable anymore on the Games and DVDs since I've grown used to it over the two months I've had the unit, BUT its extremely noticeable on cable TV. Also when friends come over for a bit of gaming the first thing they say is "Why is there a shadow behind everything?"
I've tried Gaming Mode as well as several other modes to see if I can cut down on this.. I cannot. When I called Customer Support I was simply told the problem is because I'm using low quality cables and its not their problem, to fix the problem I should purchase better quality cables. My Xbox is hooked up with a $50 HDMI cable that is sold through Best Buy so I'm not sure why this is an issue. I have also tried connecting the Xbox with the provided High Def cables and get the same results as with the HDMI cable. I also went out and bought this afternoon $40 RCA Cables for my DVD player, and well no difference there either. As for the Cable TV, well its hooked up with a standard Coaxial Cable Jack which looked fine on my Sony WEGA, but I guess is not sufficient for my Samsung.
My next issue is during any type of "loading" where there is a black screen on my television the screen flickers like a strobe light. It doesn't do this once the DVD player starts playing the movie (unless it goes back to a completely black screen) and it also does this while loading screens on video games where there is no graphics just a black screen. I also flickers while switching between sources HDMI 1 & 2 and Cable. The service rep had me unplug my TV for 30 seconds and then plug it back in, he then proceeded to tell me it was a cable issue again and I need to check all my connections, which I did several times. When this didn't prove to be an issue, he just went back to well you have a bad connection some where.
The call ended with me very irritated, and hanging up before he could finish the typical "Thanks for calling Samsung and have a great day with your possibly defective TV."
Any help would be appreciated, and sorry for venting.
-Christopher

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