True, nobody’s broadcasting in 1080p yet. But I sure see an awful lot of shows being shown in 1080i.
And for most people I know buying a big screen, the smallest they’re buying is a 50".
“Rob Pegoraro: First, nobody’s broadcasting anything in 1080p; the only way you’re likely to watch anything in that resolution is if you get a DVD player or DTV tuner that upconverts material to that resolution.”
By the way, upconverting DVD players aren’t expensive technology. You have your choice of 4 different name brand upconverting players at Best Buy for $99.
They’re becoming as commonplace as the “progressive scan” units.
I’ve never seen a 1080i LCD (both LCD and DLP are always progressive scan in my experience). I think you have some confusion about HDTV. 720p is not generally inferior to 1080i. Both have similar bandwidth and both are considered fully HDTV. 1080p may truly be superior to either 720p or 1080i, but without original 1080p source material, that superiority will not be substantially realized.
Probably the best thing about an upconverting DVD player is that you can connect it to your HDTV via a digital connection, either HDMI or DVI. If you’re watching the DVD on an LCD or DLP HDTV, it will always be upconverted to the TV’s native resolution whether you have an upconverting DVD player or not.
Analog signals do not look good on LCD screens which are much better suited to digital. LCD screens have such a high resolution compared to the old CRTs that every flaw in the source picture, and in the transmission will be very obviously visible.
If you switch to digital cable you will eliminate any flaws in the transmission - with digital you will not experience any sort of snow, ghosting, or electrical interference. You will either always get a perfectly clear picture, or if your signal is too weak you will get a frozen picture, but never snow or ghosting or wavy interfence lines.
Is this true? I’d been under the impression that CRT still had the best resolution.
A standard Picture Tube set is very low resolution compared to a 1080p LCD. There are some Hi-Def Tube sets that have amazing pictures, but even a 32" set weighs in over 200 lbs and draws a very high amperage by comparison.
Jim
My Magnavox is 1080i. It’s just a rebranded Philips sold by Sam’s club. I don’t have a huge 50" screen, though, because all of the viewing angle calculators indicated that that would be way too huge for our sofa-to-TV viewing distance. Given that, analogue signals that I heavily compress on my homebrew DVR have noticeable artifacts, but for the most part normal analogue signals are perfectly fine. Of course the original analogue signal is as good as can be, is recorded digitally, transmitted to the Xbox digitally, and comes over the component cables to the set that way.
I don’t have a digital cable package, but I can pick up a huge number of QAM signals absolutely free of charge with the built-in tuner. Maybe the OP needn’t waste his money on a digital package?
This is the reason you hear so many emperor-has-no-clothes opinions about HD television sets… no one seems to realize that you have to use the component video inputs to see an improvement.
[QUOTE=Imasquare]
Analog signals do not look good on LCD screens which are much better suited to digital. LCD screens have such a high resolution compared to the old CRTs that every flaw in the source picture, and in the transmission will be very obviously visible. [\QUOTE]
Yeah, but don’t forget that LCDs are fixed resolution. Even with a digital signal at a standard resolution the picture will not look nearly as good as High-Def feeds in the LCD’s native resolution. This is a feature of the technology, which uses fixed-size pixels on the screen itself. Anything not native to that resultion is interpolated, which could result in loss of quality.
If you bought from a big box store and are still under warranty, be sure you’re satisified with your digital feed (on my digital cable, channed 1 - 21 are still broadcast analog and coverted to digital and look not nearly as good as the true digital channels on my HD set). Otherwise, you may want to consider a plasma model, which like your old CRT is a multi-sync monitor capable of supporting a number of different signals natively rather than having to process them to suit the native resolution of the TV.
Of course, plasma’s have other drawback…go with whatever looks best to you, but be sure when shopping for a TV to ask the sales person to demonstrate what each input looks like (analog, digital, cable, high-def, DVD, etc). Each different technology has benefits and drawbacks with the each type of signal.
Which is something we should stress, incidentally: KlondikeGeoff, when you get your shiny new cable box (or better yet, cable box with high-def DVR), be sure you hook it up to your TV using component video, or preferably with an HDMI or DVI cable. Component is good, but DVI passes the digital signal from the cable company directly into your television without any analog conversion anywhere on the pipe. That’s about as pure a signal as you can possibly hope to get. Besides which, if you’re like me, the cable box is the only DVI/HDMI device you have, so, might as well use the DVI port and save the component inputs on your TV for other stuff.
The cable company will probably give you a component cable, but may not give you a DVI cable. When you buy one, don’t splurge on an expensive cable, either; a digital signal either gets there, or it doesn’t, and all the expensive gold Monster Cable shielding in the world won’t make a lick of difference. Cheap is fine.
This is indeed the main reason that standard definition looks better on traditional TVs - CRTs don’t have a fixed vertical resolution, so can show 480 (NTSC) or 575 (PAL/SECAM) with no trouble. A 720 LCD display has to interpolate, but can’t match the apparent vertical resolution of a CRT. And it’s even worse for us PAL viewers, because out native 575 standard defintion doesn’t go into 720 all. 480 goes into it quite neatly, 720 being 480 x 1.5.
Possibly, but results may vary depending on the actual hardware you have. The bottom line for Joe New-HDTV-Owner is that any of those choices (component, DVI, or HDmi) is going to be night-and-day better than your old RCA yellow. 
When I started this thread I never expected to garner such a wealth of good information. Thanks to all.
Thanks for that suggestion, Max (or is it Maximum? :D). I’ve been using component cables on other TV hookups and on my old set, and also have found out don’t have to pay exorbitant prices for HDMI cables, so will give that a try when I get the digital cable service started and hooked up.
One interesting note: in talking to a Cox cable techie, he said one thing to check is the coax cables. If they get bent too sharply, or kinked, the central wire can get moved a little toward the outside and cause problems. As I have a mare’s nest of cables with two splitters (to TV, DVD, VCR and computer), had been moving them around and connecting and disconnecting. I carefully smoothed them out and lo and behold, the picture on the new LCD improved 100%. One more thing to check.
I just got a 32" Samsung lcd and am checking in with my experience. I have the tv hooked up through a high def pvr box with a hdmi cable. The HD channels are often everything I would expect them to be. The regular TV channels look very bad and are often hard to watch.
The problem with the regular tv channels looks to be mpeg compression artifacts. For example if there are letters displayed on the screen there will be a ton of picture noise like an aura around all of the letters. This is also true for outlines of any object. I even notice this on some HD programming, but to a much lesser extent. I don’t expect regular tv to have the detail that hd does, but I still expect a clear picture at a lower resolution.
It is my experience that the way to get rid of these artifacts is to decrease the compression ratio and increase the bandwith. This may not be possible on cable because there is only so much bandwith. Is this what other people think is the main problem?
Hopefully HD dvds will contain enough bandwith to solve the problem for those programs at least.
Yeah, the problem with most cable companies is that they only have so much bandwidth to work with, so they have to compress the HD signal. This means you might get the occasional artifact or blockiness in the picture, particularly if you stare very closely at the background of the image If you don’t think about it, you won’t notice it though.
My HD also varies from channel to channel. HDNet and Discovery HD are close to immaculate, while the HD channels from the local stations sometimes have some blockiness. I suspect this is because the local channels have to go through one more step in processing before they get to me.
I’ve been told that both of the competing hi-def DVD formats have more bandwidth than what you get from the cable company, so the picture should be simply amazing. Once the HD DVD/Blu Ray format war is over, I’ll eagerly invest in a player.
The HD DVD/Blu Ray battle may eventually end with a decisive winner, but the hi-def wars will rage on and on. The industry is already abuzz about the next generation of hi-def televisions. I’m talking the second generation HD DVD/Blu Ray machines that some people speculate will have twice the resolution of first-gen HD DVD/Blu Ray technology.
Every video game demo I’ve ever seen in an electronics store on LCD screens look like utter crap IMO. Dunno if they have the hookups done incorrectly or what but it really makes the TV and the game system look horrible…
Sorry if this is too obvious, but are you using component video or composite video? Composite video is one RCA connector for video. Often, a composite cable will have 3 jacks - one for video, two for L/R audio.
A component video cable is 3 cables, one for each primary color. If you’re also hooking up audio, that’s a total of 5 RCA connectors.
I ask because alarm bells went off when you say you usually use component for TV hookups and for your old set - non-HD sets rarely have component inputs. So my guess is that you’re using composite video, which is an improvement over using coax, but not much of one.
A few other things - if you’re getting a digital box, be aware that it’s not going to give you an HD signal unless you specifically ask for an HD box, and then only if there is HD cable in your area. If you do get an HD box, most of your channels will still not be HD, even if they are digital. You’ll have to tune into the HD-only channels to get HD, and you may have to pay an extra monthly fee for it.
Some other general comments about the discussion:
When a set says that it’s “1080i compatible”, all that means is that it’s capable of syncing up a 1080i signal and displaying a coherent picture. You can buy a 1080i compatible display that will only display 1/4 of the resolution and throw the rest away.
What matters when shopping for a TV is not which HD signals it will receive (pretty much all of them will do 1080i or even 1080p). What matters is the native resolution of the display. There are ‘HD’ LCDs out there that have only 480 lines of resolution. You’ll get full resolution of a DVD, but if you put an HD signal through it, it will downconvert to 480p.
A true HD LCD tv will have 1280 X 720 pixels. If it’s a 1080p set, it will have 1920 x 1080 pixels. That’s the number to look for when determining how much resolution the set will display.
Don’t forget to check other specifications. Since HD is all about an increase in resolution, we tend to only talk about resolution when comparing various sets. But equally important is contrast ratio, and this is where LCDs often come up a little short. A high contrast ratio will give you a picture with deep blacks and bright colors - it will have more of a punchy, “3-D” look to it. A display with low contrast will have blacks that look grey, and the picture will be somewhat washed out and lifeless. Tests of subjective quality have shown that people respond just about as much to improvements in contrast as they do to improvements in resolution.
Which brings up another point: Always calibrate your set properly after you get it home. TVs are often calibrated in the factory so that they look ‘dramatic’ in a store display environment, with bright lights and surrounded by other sets where they have to stand out. Therefore, factory settings often have the brightness, color, and contrast set up way too high. This will blow out details and even cause colors to smear and bloom. Get a good calibration DVD like Avia or Video Essentials, and follow the instructions.
When you first calibrate the set, it may look dimmer and less impressive. That’s okay - just leave it properly calibrated and wait for your eyes and brain to adjust to the new picture. A properly calibrated set maximizes contrast, shadow detail, and gives you correct color. Once you adjust to it, you’ll see a higher quality picture than you saw with the factory settings.
Another important factor to consider with an HDTV is the quality of the internal scaler. The TV has to upconvert or downconvert signals from the native source to whatever the pixel resolution is. A poor scaler will create artifacts and noise, especially noticeable when there are diagonal moving lines on the screen.
If you are always feeding the set its native resolution (through an upscaling DVD player and a cable box with HD output), then the quality of the internal scaler doesn’t matter, and you can save some money there.
About upconverting DVD players - just because it upconverts doesn’t mean you’ll see a better picture. A DVD has 480 lines of resolution. If the player upconverts it, all its doing is adding interpolated lines. No new detail can be created, and you won’t see a higher resolution picture. The advantage of an upconverting DVD player is that theoretically it can do a better job of scaling than your TV can, because it has access to the scenes in the future, and can use that information to better interpolate the current image. A TV doesn’t know what’s coming next, so it has to scale the frame without any extra information. But this assumes that the upconverting DVD player actually has a high quality scaler in it. If you buy a $49 upconverting player, you may actually wind up with a worse picture because you’re substituting the decent scaler in your TV for a crappy bargain-basement one. So shop carefully. Read reviews of the players before you buy one. “Upconverting” is no guarantee of better quality.
Netflix has both Avia and Digital Video Essentials, BTW.