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You are using a normal coaxial cable to watch tv ?

If you plug in your notebook and watch a movie, it should be alright.

Normal tv / astro is not built for widescreen.

Get Astro  B.Yond, then it should be oky

BUY BLURAY PLAYER & WATCH BLURAY MOVIES IN 1080P!!!

set the TV to not stretch Astro la... but you will have to bear with the black bars on the side.

there is no way you can avoid this - either stretch or pillar boxes, the TV Is 16:9 and transmission is 4:3

best picture you can get is to turn on whatever Philips processing is on the 3609, and set to display 4:3 for Astro.

Can you save different display modes for different inputs?

Those people are lying to you. Usually what they did is they put the decoder in front, but at the back of the TV, they're playing it from another source. Probably a blu-ray to give you that ultimate quality.

Or they're simply playing a channel from Astro Byond.

u r quite naive.... the shop was obviously playing the tv from a bluray player or media player and NOT ASTRO!!!!

pls get it over your head that you will not get nice clear picture from Astro. The sooner you do that, the sooner you can go on with life...

First, what program you saw in that shop? Astro program or movies/documentary/etc pre-recorded in demo DVD or blu-ray?  Usually, those demo discs play at shop give quite good PQ in display TV (That is what their intended to achieve).

Sorry to tell you that if you use FullHD LCD to watch normal Astro program, you will not achieve the same PQ as you saw in the shop if at that time that shop used the demo disc on their display TV.

Go to Aspect setting, set it back to 4:3. This will solve your "stretched" image.
As for the PQ for Astro, go and buy the best RCA or S-Video cable to test it out and if you can improve the PQ similar to that of the shop, don't forget to share it here   

To be honest, you are just a retard

number of sifu give you advice and you still keep ignore and claim that the shop has better PQ than your house PQ with the same model LCD.

and one more thing it might be related, RM2100 for a 42" philip LCD, it might be the lowest spec FULL HD TV from Philip.

How do you even know they're showing the REAL Astro sourced programs? Did you see the back panel and see the cabel connecting the decoder and TV? If not, seriously, they're showing from a different source to give an impression you will get amazing pictures when you bring it back home although you won't with current Astro formats.

There's absolutely nothing you can do to better the quality. You might change cable and see a cleaner image. But that probably means your old cable is degrading or the newer cable is just better in construction quality.

You have to understand you cannot get those image quality unless the source itself is of that quality and Astro doesn't provide it outside of their Byond Package.

The short answer. No cable can provide scaling. So there is no such cable.

Ur astro SD source is 4:3. Ur display shd have a few modes to fill the screen. Just selecting 16:9 might be doing a horizontal stretch. What u need to do is to do a progressive stretch. However, it is still stretching and it is not going to yield a perfect picture. Select something that says, Wide or Justified modes on ur display. (This might not exist on ur set as I am not familiar with ur set). However, they will still look a little off especially in the sides of the display.

Ur other choices are, get an external scalar. siriuslycold has recommended a dvdo. The dvdo edge is a good scalar/deinterlacing processor and it will be better than ur display. However, it costs about double of ur display. It has a scalar algorithm that is one of the best coupled with ABT chip.

Another choice is use an AVR with a good scalar chip (Onkyo with Reon chips, Denon with ABT chips). Then use the AVR to scale the picture to ur display.

The most logical choice is 4:3 but u hv clearly said that u do not want that.

The other option is to use S-video cable (a good one) that will not fix the "broader" issue that u have but will reduce the noise and the colour fidelity a little.

However, SD is SD, on larger screens it will show its ugly head. Also scaling a 4:3 to a 16:9 display cannot be done without losing fidelity. Also Astro SD sources are highly compressed so its not worth spending money on a high end scalar since it will still look bad.

My recommendation for now is learn how to get used to it.

I was wondering that too. RM2100 for a 42" Phillips Full HD TV last year was amazingly cheap.