Poor resolution (HDMI) on Currys 15in HD Ready TV

[Norvin1000]

Hello, and Season's Greetings to all.

First post ever from this beginner! I bought a Raspberry Pi Model B starter kit from Farnell for my daughter's and my Xmas present, both of us being curious about learning to programme.

The immediate problem is poor screen resolution, i.e. characters with on the desktop icons, and the taskbar icons (at the bottom of the Desktop view), are looking faint and broken, whereas the Raspberry fruit graphic in the centre of the screen looks perfect.

I have used read the literature on EDID, HDMI modes etc., and have used the configurator to set what appears to be the TV's best-scoring resolution, i.e. 1080p at 50 Hz under CEA mode (hdmi_group=1 and hdmi_mode=31). I have tried all the other 12 or so HDMI modes, to no improving effect.

I have also tried the Pi on a bigger TV, our nice big family 42in LCD Panasonic telly, but it's just the same. Any help out there for this frustrated Newbie much appreciated! Phil.

[holmeso03]

I'm having the exact same problem (with a different TV), and I did read the sticky on this section to do with HDMI setup, but it's far too technically and confusingly worded for me to make sense quickly of it.

If it's any help to anyone trying to help, the RPi can't retrieve the TV data from the TV apparently ... not sure why. TV is an ALBA LCD32880HDF, so model and make seems to be slightly irrelevant I daresay?

[Mortimer]

Ah! That old chestnut...

When a shop describes a TV as "HD Ready" it usually means that the TV can process HD video signals though HDMI, like 720 or 1080p. However, the actual display used is NOT a true HD one. They will usually only display 720p video at anything like native resolution as the resolution of the actual screen will usually be something like 1366x768, i.e. not even close to the 1920x1080 resolution of "Full HD".

[Norvin1000]

Thanks for the replies. To clarify further, my Currys 15in TV is capable (both according to the manual AND the dump from the EDID enquiry from the Pi), of 1920x1080p. ALSO... our big Panasonic TV is FULL HD and is still producing the same lousy poor resolution graphics from the Pi as the smaller Currys TV. (The last part of the EDID dump from the Currys TV reads as follows) :

HDMI:EDID best score mode is now CEA (31) 1920x1080p @ 50 Hz with pixel clock 148 MHz (score 5336040)
HDMI:EDID preferred mode remained as CEA (31) 1920x1080p @ 50 Hz with pixel clock 148 MHz
HDMI:EDID has HDMI support and audio support

I have tried changing the HDMI boost, the different default font settings, and the TV set's own HDMI picture menu settings (mild, bright, personal, game, movie...), all to no avail.

Do I have a faulty Pi perhaps?

[jdb]

When you say "poor resolution", are just the text font character glyphs distorted? Like with banded fuzziness?

Can you post a photo of it?