I’m new to cord cutting but did a lot of research beforehand looking to ditch the Dish. We bought a new TCL 55" Serie 6 Roku tv for the media room and a 43" Series 5 for the bedroom. Both are hardwired into our CenturyLink fiber optical router. Picture quanlity is excellent with Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc., and with directly connected OTA antennas. Then we added the Tablo Lite also hardwired into the router and a power antenna, and all picture quality settings at the maximum settings. The Tablo picture quality is very disappointing–muddy, blurred edges, wierd motion effects, etc. I really wanted to love the Tablo and do like the ease of set up and nice interface. Now I’m wondering if we will ever be satisfied watching anything live or recorded with the Tablo. What has been your experience? Do other DVRs offer better picture quality?
I just got the TCL 6 series with Roku from Best buy when the 65" was on sale using TABLO 4 tuners mine is hardwired too and set to highest setting on live TV no complain awesome picture it’s a bargain TV that can compete to the more expensive TV twice or more in price. Put some screen shot here my camera don’t take that a great picture but you can see
Obviously, it’s very hard to diagnose what may or may not be happening on your end of things. I’ve been quite pleased with Tablo picture quality. Is live transcoding (Tablo) going to be able to beat no transcoding (typical Tivo) or optimal static (non live) transcoding (Netflix, Amazon PV)? Probably not, but not sure if I’d call it “poor”.
Have an OG Tablo 2-tuner displaying on an LG 55" OLED. Quality set to 1080 - no complaints with the quality of the picture.
If you haven’t already, try turning off the motion controls on the TV maybe that will help.
Thanks for the comment and tip. I’ll try that.
Thanks for the comment. I’ll keep trying to tweak if for now and hope for the best.
I love the my TCL, too. Great picture in other apps and directly from OTA antenna. The Tablo just seems to turn the picture quality down a notch. Not sure why. I’ll keep tweaking to see if anything improves.
Turns out I did already turned off motion smoothing yesterday when we were watching figure skating live on NBC. That was where we really noticed the picture quality issues, and I tried changing several settings in an effort to improve it. Today NBC seemed fine on a talk show with little action. I also made two recordings yesterday, Masterpiece Theater on PBS and Rent on Fox. The Masterpiece recording looks superb. Rent is so-so. Turns out Fox only broadcasts in 720p in our area while PBS is 1080p. So it appears at least some of the picture issues we noticed may be more related to the OTA broadcast signal quality and not our DVR. NBC also broadcasts in 1080p, so I’m not sure what that problem was about. Will keep looking.
I just got mine yesterday, but in setting you can change the LIVE streaming rates. I think 720p @ 3mb is the default, but you can change this to 1080. There is also a spot to change the Recording rates as well.