My First HD TV, SD Looks Lousy

[harshness]

Some HDTVs do better SD than others. To a great extent, you get what you pay for.

With many cable systems that are trying to transition to digital, their SD offerings are poor at best. A really good HDTV may be able to smooth it out. Better HDTVs make a better effort a cleaning up the artifacts of SD programming.

The SD TiVos are going to look worse unless you turn up the quality but they'll obviously never be any better than the source signal. The RF modulators aren't helping either.

 

[Pixl]

You could look for a decent AV receiver and run everything through it. Some do a decent job of up converting SD

Sounds interesting, completely new to me. Can you tell more, make, model, what it does.

Jim

 

[Justeve]

I recently upgraded to the LG 37LE5300, which is similar to yours with LED back lighting. SD looks much better on this set compared to the Olevia that it replaced. When I got the Olevia several years ago, after my CRT died I thought the exact same thing about SD. There is a gradual adjustment. (Watch it for a bit and it will appear more acceptable.)

Many SD programs over cable display a lot of heavy compression artifacts, especially older 60-70's programming that no one would buy on DVD anyway.

I have a Mac Mini connected to the LG and I was really surprised how much better Hulu and other internet content looks. It is a much cleaner and smoother looking than the Olevia. I have slow DSL and can only use "medium quality" and the PQ is somewhat between cable SD and HD

If your LG has the "truMotion" feature, play with this. I generally keep it turned off.

Another thing I noticed: I have a very low end DvD Recorder connected to the D* H20 via composite cables and the recordings are excellent compared to what I got when connected to standard cable.