We need to replace our small, seldom-used, supplemental TV but are not ready to upgrade our main TV. It’s getting hard to find a non-HDTV, and I’d consider getting a small HDTV but I’ve heard that with a non-HD signal they have a worse picture. Does anyone have any experience with this?
The reason they have “worse” SD picture is that the new TV’s will upscale that SD image to their native resolution “enhancing” all the ugly that goes along with it. The old TV’s display it at the original number of lines. Some HDTV’s will do a better job than others when upscaling SD content. Finding a small HDTV with a decent tuner and some decent image filters built in should not be very difficult and will likely yield a good SD picture (as good as SD upscale will ever look anyhow).
I have a home theater PC at home so my SD image goes through the tuner and then is processed by my ATI Radeon video card which does a phenomenal job of cleaning it up and up scaling it. I definitely prefer to watch SD on that TV than on my old SD tube in the bedroom and I’ve seen HDTV’s with similar chips from both ATI and other companies that do a good job at cleaning up SD images.
Clean SD signals look awesome on HD sets, although you have to pick through a couple of choices on what aspect you’d like to review the material at, since the HD sets are a different shape than SD sets.
‘Dirty’ SD signals – analog broadcast video with noise/snow, VHS tapes – can look pretty bad on an HD set. The set upsamples the noise & tape artifacts, and its not pretty. If you have good clean cable/satellite, and watch DVDs, you’ll be fine.
I don’t understand why it always looks terrible, because it does. Maybe I’m a total mutant, but I don’t understand why HDTV’s can’t just display the classic SD signal at the same size, but still in its lower resolution. I mean we’ve had SDTV’s with screens that size for 30 years…why can’t the HD monitor simply, uhh, show the SD signal at that size without converting it to HD and showing all the pixellization and crap?
Because it really does look that bad - basically unwatchable, as far as I’m concerned - and is probably the major reason that I’m holding off on an HDTV until *all *signals are at least simultaneously broadcast in HD and don’t have to be upconverted like that.
How do you propose they do this? There are a certain number of pixels on the screen. You either show it in a tiny 640x480 window in the middle of your screen, or you upscale it to fit the size of the screen.
And the problem with upscaling is that 480 doesn’t neatly go into the standard HD definitions of 720 and 1080.
Sharp make, or made, a HDTV with 960 lines, so each line of a SDTV picture could simply be doubled. As a result, SD looked pretty good on that TV, which was the designers’ intention. But to upscale 480 to 720, what do you do, double every other line? No, it looks terrible. So they have to smear each line across 1.5 lines of the 720-line picture, which still doesn’t look great.
Thanks for the info, I’ll be sure to make sure that the tuner and filters are up to scratch. I have a friend who says that her SD picture was great on her HDTV, and another who says it was horrible. I’ll check into who makes the first one’s set! We have digital cable, so I think the signal is pretty clean.
My Toshiba Regza 37" LCD HD set shows SD programming quite well, as good or better than my big honking 36", 250lb Sony Trinitron tube TV ever did.
Man that thing was beastly to move as wide as it was with all it’s weight in the front!
Ain’t that the truth. My 50" plasma weighs a fraction of what my 32" CRT-style set did. I blame much of my back trouble on that old boat anchor!!
My Sony Bravia 3 shows the normal TV signals better than any other TV I’ve ever seen. So I’d say they can handle them really well.
I’m happy to have all of these specifics to look at, thanks for the input! This may work out OK, and if the new TV looks good enough I may be able to convince my wife to go for the whole HD conversion!
Man, I sound so much like the guy I am…
IMO they handle them well. I have a large HDTV but no HD signals. I think the pic looks great.
My brand new Panasonic plasma TV displays SD signals beautifully. Although, I only have watched DVDs on it.
We got our HDTV last Christmas (37" Samsung) but haven’t upgraded to HD satellite service yet. Our SD satellite looks fine, and DVDs look great. We got a free HD-DVD player last year, which of course became obsolete almost immediately, but it upscales regular DVDs very nicely so we’re getting plenty of use from it.
First of all High Def signals are not preceivable in sets under 30" so it makes no sense to waste money on a high def set if it’s smaller than 30" you can’t notice the difference.
Second of all all sets have native resolution. They will scale to 720p or 1020i. FOX and ABC use 720p so if your set has native resolution of 1020i the set will scale it.
Since not all sets use the same native resolution pictures look different. Your set has a native resolution and is CAPABLE of receiving pics and scaling them of different resolution. This makes people think they have a set with more than one resolution.
Cable and Dish companies further compress signals. So watching HDTV via cable or dish is less desirable than over the air signals. I’ve seen the difference and OTA is much better. No matter what they say the cable and dish signals are compressed and not as good.
This further makes an issue.
Add to that you must hook your set up to cable or the dish CORRECTLY to receive the proper scaling. Just because you get a picture doesn’t mean you hooked it up right. So you pic could be crummy simply because you hooked it up wrong.
Will you be getting your signal over the air, basic cable (i.e:no cable box) or through a cable/satt company receiver? My 32" 1080i LCD shows digital non HD stations like CNN pretty nice but I think a lot of the answer will be dependent on what your cable company is squirting down the pipe. Crap in, crap out
Umm… CITE? That’s a pretty weird claim to make. A 20" 1080p screen would be about 110 PPI, while a 20" SD screen would be about 40 PPI.
Assuming you sit around six feet away from the TV, if my back of the envelope math is correct, with normal 20/20 vision at six feet your acuity is limited to roughly 1/100th of an inch. So if you can’t tell the difference between 110 PPI and 40 PPI from six feet away you should have your eyes checked.
HD would offer no improvement if the PPI of SD exceeds your visual acuity at your viewing distance. Which for six feet and 20/20 vision should be about 8.5" diagonal or smaller.
Let’s not reinvent the wheel. The OP says his TV is “Small, seldom-used, supplemental.” It’s still possible to find inexpensive CRT models (with ATSC tuners) at stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
But, why?
I replaced our tiny bedroom CRT with a “tiny” widescreen HDTV. Still watching standard def, but we can see what’s going on. (And I can read subtitles.)
That’s nonsense. I had a 27" CRT HDTV for several years and the difference between it and standard-def TVs was quite obvious. Even when playing video games in 1080i vs 480i, the difference was quite noticeable. Perhaps you’re thinking of viewing distances?