so you all know that i recently bought a 42" samsung plasma,and was wondering howcome when i'm watching normal tv(sky digital) the picture is fussy and generally my old crt looks better,but my xbox 360 looks amazing on it.and then teh other day my satelitte reciever broke and the company(sky) came out to replace it,and i asked teh guy why the picture does not look so good and the said that the reciever is sending a 50(i don't know the unit) refresh rate and my tv would be operating at 100 refresh rate.and he said my tv was getting ahead of it's self and that when the release an hd reciever eventually that the picture will look much better and clear...is this all true?
I don't know if what you were told is true but I have read that the way the signals are sent will be changing in the next couple of years and that non hi-def programs will look a lot better but I wanted to tell you of something I experienced that helped:
Like you, I bought a hi-def TV (a sony LCD) and even though the hi-def stuff was totally awesome, the other stations weren't great and I was certain that the pic on my CRT was better. I was told that it was all in my head; that because hi def was so good, the others seemed worse by comparison. I didn't buy it for a moment but watched it that way for a long time because I thought I had no choice.
A buddy came over with his brother in law who was some sort of AV guy and he did two things. He left only the HI-def connection from the cable box to the hi def input on the tv (I have that one in component cables because I use HDMI with my DVD upconverter) and he completely disconnected the regular RCA plugs from the cable box to the TV. He then accessed some menus from my cable box itself which I didn't even know were there (neither did the comcast tech I guess). Anyway, there were menu selections from the cable box itself as to how the signal is delivered to the TV. That made all the difference in the world. I mean, regular stations didn't look like hi def naturally but they were as good as they were on my CRT. If you had comcast hi def, I'd explain how to access those menus but I do remember the guy saying that all boxes had such menus so yours must too. I don't know if you knew about that or not but I know I didn't and met others who didn't and it made all the difference.
it might have such a menu,but at the moment,under the signal section,it's all locked,and besides my reviever does not have any hi def outputs at all,it just has the standard av outputs,one red wire,one yellow wire and one white wire,and that's it...
Its simple. A CRT, unlike other technologies, isn't a Fixed Pixel Display meaning that CRTs don't have a fixed resolution.
Plasma sets on the other hand are FPDs. Your 42" Plasma probably has a native resolution of either 1280x720 or 1366x768 right? Since the native resolution is the only resolution the TV can display all incoming video signals must be "Scaled" to that resolution.
@ gerry1,
Your friend's friend must have set the cable box to upconvert the signal by setting the output resolution closer (if not matched exactly) to your tv's native resoltion. It should have had the same effect as swtiching from a regular DVD player to a DVD player with upconvertion.
