It seems to have lost the High Def function. Picture looks more like old low-definition. Anyone have any ideas why? (I hope it wasn’t Mrs Piper’s Hallmark movie binge!)
IDK but the term for your TV would now be SD for standard definition, not LD.
Might be the TV, might be the signal that it’s getting.
Many TVs these days have some sort of info function that will tell you the resolution of the signal that it is displaying (480p, 780p, 1080p etc.). If you have crappy cables, a bad connection somewhere, or Comcast, that could be degrading the signal.
If it’s the TV, don’t immediately assume that the TV has broken. Someone may have accidentally hit the settings button and changed something. Look through all of your video settings and make sure nothing was accidentally changed.
All the times I’ve seen this is when someone has switched to the SD version of a channel.
On our cable systems channel 2 is on 002 SD and 802 HD. Sometimes a cable box, for example, gets put on the SD range and they don’t notice that.
For OTA, the SD version of a channel is often available as a side channel. E.g., 5.1 is HD and 5.3 is SD. So it takes more stupid persistence to screw that up … which means it does happen.
(Frankly, I am amazed by how many people don’t even realize they’re watching SD when HD is available.)
What is feeding your TV? Cable box, antenna, Roku/Firestick, etc?
If it’s a cable box or Roku or other external device, check that you’re watching the HD channel content, and also check the settings on the device- sometimes when external equipment does a firmware upgrade, it resets all the saved settings to the default, so it would go back to SD output to the TV.
If it’s antenna, rescan all your channels and make sure you’re not watching one of the side channels - some stations will broadcast the primary content on their main channel (e.g channel 7-1), but put other content on side channels (7-2, 7-3, etc.)
Happens to me when the network slows down while streaming, so the software lowers the resolution so the show can keep playing. I haven’t seen it happen with cable or satellite, but I have less experience with those.
Of course, I forgot the most obvious problem, that someone hit the “format” button on your remote and put the TV into 480i format. Though when that happens on my my mom’s satellite, there’s a “this isn’t the recommended resolution” nag box on the screen.
I was going to suggest this as a possibility. For me, it most often happens at the cable box level, not the tv level, when the kids somehow get into the cable box menu and accidentally knock the resolution down (and/or screw up the aspect ration.) Happens less now that they’re 5 and 3, but when the oldest one was between one and two, she seemed to have a knack for somehow activating that menu and changing the settings. First time it took me about twenty minutes to figure out which menu and where in the menu the setting change was. I didn’t even realize my cable box had its own menu options, and it took me a bit to even figure out how to access them on my universal remote.