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