Standard Def on High Def Panny Plasma.

[mitch57]

I just got my new Panasonic TH-50PX50U on Sunday. The high def channels from Direct TV with my HR10-250 TiVo over component video look absolutely amazing. Kind of like looking through a window amazing. But the standard def channels look absolutely horrible!

I've tried all the different settings including "zoom, full, Just, and 4:3". When in 4:3 mode the picture looks okay but not good and then of course I get the ugly side bars.

I've heard that this is an issue with any high def tv when displaying SD channels. Is this true? Is there anything you can do about this other then wait for more high def channels to come out? I would prefer to watch SD on a standard 4:3 set over watching it on a HD set. My Sony Wega 36" had a great picutre on SD channels but of course, I didn't have high def signals at the time.

DVD's look great on the Panny as well. Everything looks good with the excpeption of SD.

Woe is me . Does anyone else share my grief and disappointment? You know how it goes. Misery loves company.

[Kevin P]

It could be the channels you are watching. Locals on satellite in particular tend to look bad. Try a sports or movie channel if you get any to see how they look.

Since DVD is essentially SDTV or EDTV (with a progressive player), if it looks good then the scaler in the set is doing its job. Are you running your DVD player via progressive component, or what? If you switch the DVD to interlaced, how does it look? How is your DVD player connected to the TV?

I'm curious since I bought a similar plasma to yours (50" Panasonic, but mine's a monitor, the TH50PHD8UK). It's still in the box since my house still isn't ready yet.

[ajpoe]

Some people view the HD channels via component cable in 1080i or whatever and then run a separate S-Video cable to view the standard channels in their standard 480i format. You'd just have to switch inputs depending on the content you're watching and switch the output format on the HD Tivo. I have the same unit and just output 1080i the whole time via component cables and my standard channels look OK. I think everything that isn't HD looks bad after watching HD for a while

[Shane Martin]

I assume you have your set calibrated? My friend has a 50UY and he is feeding HDMI from his HD DVR box(directivo) to his Plasma and the standard def channels look poopy. They looked fine thru his non HD tivo so I'm going to assume something is up with the HD Tivo and it's PQ output for standard def.

[aud19]

Unfortunately HDTV's just show you more clearly how bad your SD channels are :lol: This can and will depend a lot on your service provider and even individual channels quality.

A couple things that might help are the suggestions mentioned above, especially calibration with Digital Video Essentials or Avia, or even better an ISF tech.

Also turn your sharpness control as low as it will go or off and try any noise reduction features your set may have if your signal is THAT bad.

As for TIVO's/DVR's, they all convert EVERYTHING to MPEG to record on the hard drive before sending the signal to your TV. This works great for digital/HDTV channels as they're already digital. However for analog SDTV signals they take an inferior quality signal that has to go through an analog to digital conversion before it's spat out to your set. Hence the degredation in quality of SD channels on DVR units

[Shane Martin]

As for TIVO's/DVR's, they all convert EVERYTHING to MPEG to record on the hard drive before sending the signal to your TV.

False. The Directivos record directly from the stream so no conversion is necessary or required. They are way different than typical dvrs

[aud19]

False. The Directivos record directly from the stream so no conversion is necessary or required. They are way different than typical dvrs

That's because that would be already in digital/MPEG as I mentioned Shane

This works great for digital/HDTV channels as they're already digital. However for analog SDTV signals they take an inferior quality signal that has to go through an analog to digital conversion before it's spat out to your set.

Perhaps it would have been more clear if I had said they convert everything that's not already digital/MPEG.