Why does standard TV look so bad on LCD TV?

Elmo P. Shagnasty wrote:

In article ,
"Bob (but not THAT Bob)" wrote:

Yep, SD TV will always look like crap on any HD set

I think you mean to say that "analog TV will always look like crap on
any digital set".


True - I find myself, like so many people, calling current standard NTSC
TV content SD, even though "analog" is correct.

Bob (but not THAT Bob) wrote:
Elmo P. Shagnasty wrote:

In article ,
"Bob (but not THAT Bob)" wrote:

Yep, SD TV will always look like crap on any HD set

I think you mean to say that "analog TV will always look like crap
on
any digital set".


True - I find myself, like so many people, calling current standard
NTSC
TV content SD, even though "analog" is correct.

But it IS SD on an analog carrier. When you get down to it, the actual
point where it REALLY goes to crap is the chroma/luma separation for
the decoding back to RGB. A really fine one would come very close to
DTV. Thing is, why bother as it will only approach DTV and never
surpass it.

I worked at Sony Broadcast back in the late '80s when they were showing
analog HD with a very special 1" analog tape machine running 4 parallel
10 MHz channels with 2 of them restored to a 20 MHz green channel in
the digitial time base corrector. Sorry, that was just to point out
that analog HD actually exists.

GG

"Bob (but not THAT Bob)" wrote in message
...
Elmo P. Shagnasty wrote:

In article ,
"Bob (but not THAT Bob)" wrote:

Yep, SD TV will always look like crap on any HD set

I think you mean to say that "analog TV will always look like crap on
any digital set".

What I have noticed is that the up-scaling in some HD sets, for lack of a
better word, is crappy on 480i material. The incoming resolution has to be
scaled to the display resolution and doing this well in real time is not a
trivial job. It is too bad that most reviews focus on performance with a HD
input rather than the performance on SD material. If the signal is analog,
the slight noise exacerbates the problem, but even digital SD material looks
poor if the set can not do a good job of scaling in incoming resolution.

David

If you aren't too far from the local TV towers, you might try any old
raggedy UHF rabbit ears to see if you can pick up any HDTV channels. I tried
that the first day I brought home my HDTV set and was amazed...the rabbit
ears picked up a perfectly clear HDTV signal from four stations.


"EOSJO" wrote in message
ups.com...
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:
Greetings.

(snip)

Do all LCD TVs look bad when viewing analog SD TV?

Just in case anyone is shopping for an LCD or plasma TV and has similar
concerns, I'll point out that Consumer Reports magazine, which tests
LCD and plasma TVs, includes information about how well these TVs do
with standard broadcast signals.

See recent issues on newsstands and/or at libraries. Or see:

www.ConsumerReports.org

(You might need a membership in the web site to see everything.)

As Consumer Reports found, many LCD and plasma TVs don't look good with
standard TV boradcast signals. Good old CRTs often have a better
picture.

(snip)

Are you saying that the lower numbers on the bar has more blurring?I have
mine set at 10 on sony xbr 40"lcd ,I dont see blurry picture.
"Bruce Tomlin" wrote in message
...
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.

wrote in message
oups.com...

EOSJO wrote:
Greetings.

(snip)

Do all LCD TVs look bad when viewing analog SD TV?

Just in case anyone is shopping for an LCD or plasma TV and has similar
concerns, I'll point out that Consumer Reports magazine, which tests
LCD and plasma TVs, includes information about how well these TVs do
with standard broadcast signals.

See recent issues on newsstands and/or at libraries. Or see:

www.ConsumerReports.org

(You might need a membership in the web site to see everything.)

As Consumer Reports found, many LCD and plasma TVs don't look good with
standard TV boradcast signals. Good old CRTs often have a better
picture.

(snip)

You why they employ so many people at Consumers Reports?

Because individually they couldn't find their ass with both hands.

I have Time Warner cable and the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD DVR. I am
connected via HDMI. My Sharp will not do 480i over HDMI (not a required
resolution per the spec apparently), so I only allow 480p, 720p, and 1080I
and I have to say this box does a great job upping 480i to 480p.

Digital 480i channels look great.

I just bought a 50'' LCD. It's hooked up to the local Cable's HD box. They
have three kinds of channels.

SD Analog (basic cable) - Some of these channels look very good, I'd say
near HD quality. (Of course they are all 4x3 format.) All the OTA network
channels look pretty bad though.

SD Digital (extended cable) - These are the old pre-HD digital channels.
They all have digital artifacts that look pretty bad on a big screen.

HD Digital (special cable box) - Looks fantastic!

--
Bob D.

"EOSJO" wrote in message
ups.com...
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! :-)

On Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:26:44 -0500, Bob D. wrote:

I just bought a 50'' LCD. It's hooked up to the local Cable's HD box. They
have three kinds of channels.

SD Analog (basic cable) - Some of these channels look very good, I'd say
near HD quality. (Of course they are all 4x3 format.) All the OTA network
channels look pretty bad though.

SD Digital (extended cable) - These are the old pre-HD digital channels.
They all have digital artifacts that look pretty bad on a big screen.

HD Digital (special cable box) - Looks fantastic!

And all the OTA ATSC networks would look just as good if not better than
cable if you had a proper antenna system. It's a fact that the signal
quality CAN'T be any better than OTA and most cable HD broadcast are not
as good as OTA. I could disconnect my antenna and connect to rabbit ears
and say OTA sucks here too. IOW's your comparison is meaningless.

--
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