How bad is the regular cabl picture on a HDTV?
Answer:
Geez, we DON'T need an hour long Dissertation to describe how GOOD HD and Digital channels are going to look.
They'll look GREAT..
But your old "regular Cable" channels are going to look SNOWY.and on a 65 INCH TV...it's going to be "magnified"
So MAKE SURE if you have a SNOWY PICTURE, to call the Cable repairman and make sure your signal strength AT THE TV is no less than 0 to a -1 db level.have him fix it if it's less than a - 3 db level..The minus 2 level is the gray area where it may have some effect or none at all...
NOW..neither the CABLE or the TV repairman can make a LOW DEFINITION signal look Better on a TV designed for a HI DEFINITION SIGNAL..
MY HD sets play the HD channels... in HD. The non-HD channels look like they do now on your non-HD TV. You'll notice the difference but if it's not broadcast in HD it'll look normal.
If it's 65 inches, it'll look like a 65 inch image, like they had before HD. The image looks slightly blurry compared to HD, bu it's perfectly watchable.
Depends on the TV too.
Knowing a little something about how TVs work may give you a pretty good idea of how the picture will work.
First off ,there is a difference between HD ready and an HD TV. That seems to be a different question.
The next important thing to know is if you are getting a 720i or a 1080i.
A TV is a basically a grid of colored dots that when viewed from a distance look like an image.
The 720 and 1080 are the number of horizontal lines that your TV can support.
A really large TV needs more lines to make the image look crisp.
Different medium have different amounts of resolution on them.
VHS: 320 lines
DVD: 500 lines
blu-ray/HDDVD:1080 lines
Back before flat panels, a 32 in TV was huge and 500 was all that was needed. Larger TVs need the more lines to look great.
Most non-HD will be broadcast with 500 lines like a DVD.
HD channels will have the clarity of a blu-ray disk.
If your TV is a 720i, then regular channels will look 500/720 or 69% as good as an HD channel.
If you have a 1080i, you may want to either sit more then 8 feet back from your TV or be prepared for a very noticeable loss in quality.
Depends how big the screen is, and what kind of TV it is. Standard definition is 480 lines of interlaced resolution. It's quality is going to look noticeably worse as the size of the screen gets bigger. 65 inches, is a very big screen size, so it's not going to look the greatest, but you will still be able to watch it. I would compare it to the quality of watching your average video on youtube, the quality isn't great, but it's generally good enough to see what's going on.
Another thing that effects the quality is whether or not the TV is using DLP or Digital Light Processing. DLP is great when dealing with digital signals. Examples include, watching a DVD, Watching all channels on Direct TV or Dish network since all channels are digital, and the digital cable channels (all channels that are above 100 generally).
Watching analog pictures on a DLP TV looks much worse than a TV without it because the tinny mirrors inside the TV amplify the distortions in the picture making it look a lot fuzzier or grainy. Examples of an analog signal would be a tape in your VCR and the lower channels if you use cable (1-100), even if you have digital cable because those basic channels always stay analog.
So what I'm saying is, if this TV is DLP, tapes and basic cable are going to look even worse than a regular 65 inch high def tv, but DVD's and Digital cable are going to look a little better.
If you really want to see how this looks though, I would recomend you go to Circuit City (because I know they have both cable and sattelite feeds) and have them show you what it is going to look like.
I hope this helps
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