I bought a new LCD TV a few days ago. I finally replaced my old aging Sony 27″ Wega which still works like a charm and picture quality is just as good as any present generation television set, non-Full HD of course.
After spending two months searching and comparing specs I decided to picked up the Samsung LN-S2651D. Upon setting up the television and plugging my media center to it, I noticed the quality of the picture was horrible. Worse than my old Sony set. I couldn’t figure out the cause of the poor quality. My new TV wouldn’t go any higher than a resolution 800×600, and I know my new TV supports up to 1366×768. I spent two days installing several different drivers for my video card and looking up several community forums for some sort of answer. It seems the posters in the forums have a writing skill level of a fifth grader. I got a headache trying to make sense of what they were writing about.
In the end, I just figured this whole setup just ain’t going to work with an s-video connection. So I headed to my local computer store and picked up a DVI to HDMI cable and hooked it up. Lone and behold my new TV was able to hit its max resolution (actually 1280×720). The picture is awesome. It even looks better than my Dell 2407 24″ desktop monitor. The DVI-HDMI connection makes a huge difference. So anyone setting up a media center on their widescreen HD television I recommend you use a DVI or an HDMI connection. Composite and s-video won’t cut it. Component connection may yeild slightly better results, but definitely try to stick to DVI/HDMI.