Why does standard TV look so bad on LCD TV?

Greetings.

I'm very new to the HDTV world. I live in the back woods (LOL) and our
cable provider is finally offering digital cable with HDTV channels. So
I figured I would upgrade my service and experience a bit of HDTV.
After some research on the web I purchased a 23" Sony Bravia
KDL-23S2010 LCD TV for my office. It will take about 2 weeks for the
cable company to install my new HDTV box so until then I'm watching the
same 73 analog channels I've been getting.

Do all LCD TVs look bad when viewing analog SD TV? I had previously
been using a 19" Sony Trinitron which had a picture just about equal to
a studio monitor. Standard TV on this LCD is very fuzzy and blocky
looking.

I have a DVD player hooked up via the component inputs and it looks
okay and hooking my laptop up via the VGA inputs is breath taking... so
why does TV look so bad.

With HDTV and Digital Cable I'll have 10 HDTV channels and 170 standard
TV channels. Am I doomed to forever watch poor quality standard TV?

Suggestions welcome! :-)

"EOSJO" wrote in message
ups.com...
Greetings.
.................................................. ......
With HDTV and Digital Cable I'll have 10 HDTV channels and 170 standard
TV channels. Am I doomed to forever watch poor quality standard TV?

Suggestions welcome! :-)


Wait until you get your digital cable. Digital SD on my 37"Sharp is closer
to DVD quality than to analog. The quality of local broadcast stations will
depend on how the cable operator gets its feed from the stations. I no
longer have the analog input of the Sharp connected to cable - its useless.

I suspect that many TV manufacturers consider it a waste of money to include
decent analog circuitry in what is basically a digital TV.

Tam

Will this problem be solved in a couple of years when all stations will be
analog?

Meant to say "when all stations will be digital"

In article . com,
says...
Do all LCD TVs look bad when viewing analog SD TV? I had previously
been using a 19" Sony Trinitron which had a picture just about equal to
a studio monitor. Standard TV on this LCD is very fuzzy and blocky
looking.

Two things come to mind:

1) Your Bravia screen has much higher resolution than analog
SD can supply, so interpolation (scaling) algorithms must make
up new extra pixels to fill the need. It's an oversimplification,
but the extra pixels could be thought of as the average of the
pixels on either side, which can tend to look like blur.

2) Sony's factory settings suck IMO. I had to turn off just
about every "enhanced" feature on mine to get it to look good.
Took a couple hours to get it close and a couple weeks of
watching and occaisional minor tweaks, but now looks at least
as good as my CRT set on everything.

Ol' Duffer wrote:
In article . com,
says...
Do all LCD TVs look bad when viewing analog SD TV? I had previously
been using a 19" Sony Trinitron which had a picture just about equal to
a studio monitor. Standard TV on this LCD is very fuzzy and blocky
looking.

Two things come to mind:
2) Sony's factory settings suck IMO. I had to turn off just
about every "enhanced" feature on mine to get it to look good.
Took a couple hours to get it close and a couple weeks of
watching and occaisional minor tweaks, but now looks at least
as good as my CRT set on everything.

I've been tweaking the setting somewhat. I also have a Tivo Series2
which I always watched via an S-video connection to my 19" CRT. It
always looked very close to the original as I keep it on the maximum
quality setting.

I plugged the same S-video into the back of the Sony Bravia and it too
looks horrible. It reminds me of an over-sharpened JPEG. Lots of
compression artifacts are visible. It always looked fine on the analog
TV.

My digital cable is going to have the HD DVR so hopefully it will look
better.

New technology always seems to be 2 steps forward and 1 step back. :-)

EOSJO wrote:

Greetings.

I'm very new to the HDTV world. I live in the back woods (LOL) and our
cable provider is finally offering digital cable with HDTV channels. So
I figured I would upgrade my service and experience a bit of HDTV.
After some research on the web I purchased a 23" Sony Bravia
KDL-23S2010 LCD TV for my office. It will take about 2 weeks for the
cable company to install my new HDTV box so until then I'm watching the
same 73 analog channels I've been getting.

Do all LCD TVs look bad when viewing analog SD TV? I had previously
been using a 19" Sony Trinitron which had a picture just about equal to
a studio monitor. Standard TV on this LCD is very fuzzy and blocky
looking.

I have a DVD player hooked up via the component inputs and it looks
okay and hooking my laptop up via the VGA inputs is breath taking... so
why does TV look so bad.

With HDTV and Digital Cable I'll have 10 HDTV channels and 170 standard
TV channels. Am I doomed to forever watch poor quality standard TV?

Suggestions welcome! :-)

Yep, SD TV will always look like crap on any HD set - those who say
otherwise simply don't remember how good regular NTSC broadcasts looked
on their old analog CRT set.

I've been tempted to mount my 42" HD in front of my 32" analog TV, and
raise it out of the way with a pr. of linear actuators so I can watch SD
programs on my old set - but laziness has prevented me so far.

"Sue" wrote in message
...
Will this problem be solved in a couple of years when all stations will be
analog?

I think you mean all stations will be digital.

Greetings.

I'm very new to the HDTV world. I live in the back woods (LOL) and our
cable provider is finally offering digital cable with HDTV channels. So
I figured I would upgrade my service and experience a bit of HDTV.
After some research on the web I purchased a 23" Sony Bravia
KDL-23S2010 LCD TV for my office. It will take about 2 weeks for the
cable company to install my new HDTV box so until then I'm watching the
same 73 analog channels I've been getting.

Do all LCD TVs look bad when viewing analog SD TV? I had previously
been using a 19" Sony Trinitron which had a picture just about equal to
a studio monitor. Standard TV on this LCD is very fuzzy and blocky
looking.

No, it should not. The cable (TW) analog channels looks very good on my 61"
JVC. In fact it looks so good I don't even bother to sign up for HD. In
theory, 23" should look better than 61". There are three possible reasons
for your problem:

1. The TV was not adjusted properly.
2. The TV is not good.
3. The analog signals are not good. It's very important to have good signal
for digital TV.

In article ,
Ol' Duffer wrote:

2) Sony's factory settings suck IMO. I had to turn off just
about every "enhanced" feature on mine to get it to look good.
Took a couple hours to get it close and a couple weeks of
watching and occaisional minor tweaks, but now looks at least
as good as my CRT set on everything.

....and I would add to be careful about the sharpness setting. When I
got my HD-ready Sony CRT a few years ago, it took me a while to realize
that zero sharpness was the middle setting. If you set it to the left
end of the bar, you would actually get _negative_ sharpness, or in plain
English, more blurring.

The only "enhancement" that I leave turned on is the analog to 480p
up-conversion.