Sony Home Theater Help

Im Having trouble getting proper playback of blu-rays from ps3. Most blurays i watch look terrible and very grainy. Sometimes its even worse than if i watch a standard DVD. Here's my setup:

80gb ps3

Philips 42'' 1080p TV Model # 42PFL3603D/F7

Sony 5.1 Surround Sound Model# STR-K740P

I have the ps3 hooked up to the TV Via HDMI set to display 1080p. (My TV tells me its displaying 1080p when im watching a bluray even though it looks horrendous) I tried using my component cables with the proper settings and it still looks bad. This is really puzzling considering every game i have played looks fantastic. Tomb raider: underworld, Resident Evil 5, and especially bioshock all look amazing. Ive tried a couple different movies including rest stop, resident evil apocalypse, resident evil extinction, and Nick and Norah's infinite playlist, but they all looked horrible. The only bluray i watched that looked good was FFVII: advent children complete, but im sure thats because its CGI. Anyone with insight Please help!!! Most of the settings in the ps3 are confusing so im sure i dont have something set right.

dang dude not sure...only thing I can think of is that your TV is switching display settings everytime it plays a movie? Maybe you have your PS3 on Game mode and it switches to standerd definition. Sorry I'm not sure.

Sometimes film grain is just more visible in HD releases.

In the early days of DVD, they would digitally remove film grain and then sharpen the image so that it looked good on SD (standard definition) TVs. But people started noticing the problems that excessive edge enhancement and grain reduction caused on DVD, mainly halos appearing around objects from excessive sharpening and people's skin looking like plastic from grain reduction.

So with Blu-ray they are cutting back more on the use of edge enhancement and grain reduction. Some people prefer that Blu-rays look like the original film material, and that includes the grain. The movie "300" was digitally filmed, but they actually added a grain effect later to make it look more like traditional film.

To find out if it's just the grain that you are seeing, and not some other problem, rent "Cars" or "Ratatouille" on Blu-ray. They were both rendered directly to a digital image, so there should be no grain. How do they look?

You also might want to tune your TV's settings (there are calibration discs that walk you through it). Your TV might be set up to exaggerate contrast and brightness, they do that to make them stand out at the store. A simple fix might be to just change the automatic picture settings from "Vivid" to "Film" or "Standard".

thanks for the info this is really helpful.I have my tv set to "personal" my tv performed an automatic setup when i first powered it on, prompting meto choose the better looking image between 2. however, i havent used a disc nor have i had it professionally calibrated. i have ratatouille on standard dvd, and i dont know whether a bluray copy would matter but it looks good on my tv. im betting that wat you said about the film grain is wats going on here, as when i was watching rest stop on bluray some scenes looked fantastic, while others (particularly darker scenes) were very grainy.