I’m going to bring it in to best buy and have them hook it up. I got a laptop to check out too anyway.
I don’t. I inherited the TV. So is that the difference? I have been asking that in this thread.
I suspect Yes. An HD TV will look like crap without an HD signal (from an HD box). You probably have a digital-to-analog box that if it deals with HD at all, it down-converts it to lower resolution.
Why cable companies, almost 20 years after the the first HD broadcasts and 8 years after analog transmissions ended, still charge extra for HD is a debate for another thread…
Yes, the real question is - What is the feed to the TV? How are you getting the crappy signal that you see?
I don’t think they’ve made TV’s with analog inputs for quite a while, have they?
DVD’s and such, certainly nothing that puts out HD in analog (you know, the yellow cable - composite - or the Red/Green/Blue cables and red and white for audio)
Cable boxes - do they still make ones that put out anything except HDMI (the flat D-shaped plug)?
We had a box from Bell TV (which IIRC used the same satellite TV tech as the Dish system in the USA). It was great in that it put out HD in RGB(analog) for my old Sony Projection, which unfortunately I bought the last year before HDMI (digital) came along.
It could feed other TV’s in the house as well, but only on regular cable-TV cables, and the picture quality absolutely sucked if the cable was more than about 20 feet long. (I.e. living room to bedroom)
Along with new flat screens we switched to a cable system that does DVR and HD to every TV.
Older flat screen TVs were made as 720P - but even that is plenty sharp compared to good old tube TVs. (I never saw why anyone would want movies in letterbox until I got a DVD player and a good TV)
VHS was OK for tube TV because the analog circuitry in a TV was rarely good enough for anything sharper; there were special monitors for computers because they could not reproduce 80 characters of type on the screen without blur, and color? Fuggedaboutit.
DVD’s are only 720x480 IIRC, but since they typically (unless you have a really old one) do HDMI only, not analog, the picture should be sharp. The signal, pixel by pixel, is transmitted to the TV with no Lossy analog in between.
The first TV I selected on Amazon has an NTSC tuner and component inputs. There are still analog low-power stations, and cable systems with unencrypted analog channels, so someone might still want a TV that can receive those signals directly.
The new one I just installed a few weeks ago has HDMI, composite, and component outputs.
The thing is my impulse lately has been to cut the strings entirely. If I had a way of getting news channels without TV I’d go all on the computer. I don’t enjoy the services provided by xfinity. It doesn’t resemble TV anymore. it’s going to get worse and worse.
The Connection is the cable with the little wire in the middle you have to screw in.
So instead of cable, you can get an Amazon Fire TV (for movies and shows) and a HDTV antenna for the local news. Both Netflix and Amazon are making many of the better shows these days, not available on the traditional cable/TV networks anyway.
If this TV you inherited is less than, say, ten years old, it’s an HDTV whether you want it or not. The old CRT sets were analog, and the scanning lines would sort of merge so they looked like a continuous picture. The new sets have discrete pixels and don’t do a good job of handling a crappy analog signal. But give then a real 720p or a 1080p signal and they look really good.
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That’s called “coax” and you are indeed watching the lowest resolution signal possible on your TV. If you’ve got a cable company, they can upgrade you to a cable box capable of HD. If not, you can either attach an antenna and use the built in ATSC tuner, or get a firestick or roku or something.
The analogy I use - your old CRT was a horse drawn buggy. It may have been a really good horse drawn buggy, but that’s what it was. Your new TV is a car. It may be a nice car, it may be an economy car, but it’s a car. By attaching the coax cable to your new TV, you’re hooking up the horses to your car, then complaining that it’s worse than the buggy was.
I’m not sure why you’re not answering the questions being asked about your setup. We can’t diagnose your problem based on our guesses about what you have. You’ve been asked what the model number of the TV is. That’s important to know. You’ve been asked what your signal source is. That’s even more important to know. You haven’t answered either question, although you let slip that the signal source is connected to the TV via coax. That’s a big clue as to where your problem lies, since as mentioned, coax provides the lowest possible resolution of any video connector still in use. So what’s connected to the other end of the coax? Cable box? OTA converter? Whatever it is, it probably has a digital signal it wants to send to the TV. But you’re making it convert the digital signal to analog, send it down the coax to the TV, which then reconverts the analog signal back to digital for display. The two conversions cause a large degradation in signal quality. You should connect your video source (whatever it is) via HDMI cable to the TV, so that the signal remains digital through the whole path. If your video source doesn’t have an HDMI output, you should look into replacing it.
There are two kinds of video streams: Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD). SD video looks terrible on a flatscreen since it’s a small image zoomed out to fit the screen. Stuff will tend to look blocky. HD streams look crisp and sharp.
Cable companies often have two channels for the same network where one is SD and another is HD. So the SD stream of ABC may be available as channel 7 and the HD stream as channel 507. In your cable system, see if you can sort the guide to only show HD channels. View one of those and see how it looks on your TV. Sometimes the cable company charges extra for HD channels, so there’s a chance you might not have the full HD lineup.
This doesn’t explain why my old TV looks great and the flat screen looks like garbage.
Because a horse can pull a buggy more easily than a car.
It’s a 26 LG30.
“You haven’t answered either question, although you let slip that the signal source is connected to the TV via coax.”: Signal source? It’s xfinity. I described it already. What are you asking?
Which was my question in the OP: Are TVs made so that they look like shit now without HDTV. The answer is Yes, although we took a little while to get here.
Lets put it this way: Are all TVs in production HDTV sets? and will this mean you will have inferior pictures when you don’t have HD service?
Xfinity has cable boxes.
But if it has a digital signal that it wants to send, why does it look better on the old TV?
I don’t have HD and still use my CRT sets. They still look fine.
Because you are most likely viewing a low-resolution SD channel. If you watched channel 7 on your tube TV and you’re watching the same SD low resolution channel 7 on your flat screen, the smaller image is being stretched and looks like crap. The same thing happens with little images on the computer. If you take a little thumbnail and stretch it to fill the whole screen, it looks blocky even though it looked perfect when it was tiny.
Go through the guide and find one of the HD channels. They are often at higher numbers, like maybe above 200. It should say HD somewhere, like “507 ABC (HD)”. See what an HD channel looks like.
But that won’t work for him, because he’s connecting the xfinity cable box to the new TV via a coax cable. In fact, in that case the HD channel it will probably look worse than the SD channel, since the box has to downsample the 1080i stream to a 480i stream to put it on coax.
drad dog, from what you’ve described, the problem has nothing to do with the television set itself. If the cable box has an HDMI connector on it, buy an HDMI cable and use it. If the cable box doesn’t have an HDMI connector on it, call xfinity and tell them you want to upgrade to HD. But buying a different flat screen HDTV won’t noticeably improve your existing setup.