I am thinking about buying a new tv over the next week. I know i wan to get 1080p. I have seen a few plasmas and lcd's and they all display SD TV differently. My brothers plasma stretches the screen and it looks bad, my friends shows it nicely. I've heard some TV's put block bars next to the show to fix this (but i think that would annoy me). I have comcast digital cable, so my first question is what tv will be best? ($1,500 range). Since it is digital cable, how will the tv show the channels that are not HD, will the have black bars, or will they be strechted etc? I really would like to take advantage of a no payments for a year deal so any help in which brand/model would be great. Thanks
The only perfect solution for displaying 4:3 sources on a 16:9 TV is the side bars of which you spoke. Anything else will distort and or crop the picture.
As MysticE said, any widescreen TV will have to pillarbox (the black bars you speak of), zoom (cropping top and bottom), or stretch (distorting the image) any 4:3 content, whether it's SD or HD. Keep in mind you're talking about changing the shape of the image. The look of SD video is mostly dependent on the quality of the TV's scaler (the circuitry that changes resolution). This is also what determines how much stretching or zooming fullscreen video damages the image. If you want to find out how well a TV scales there's no substitute for looking at it yourself. The difference between two scalers isn't usually something you can quantify. Good and bad are subjective, and depend more on what artifacts don't bother you vs. which ones stick out and annoy you.
Which TV best shows SD? A standard definition TV! There really is no mixing of the two. Some HDTVs will do better displaying SD than others and newer sets generally do a better job than older ones. It all has to do with the quality of the "scaler" and the analog to digital converter built in to the set. To be happy with the video quality, ultimately you will have to get high definition programming. If you have no plans to do that for awhile I suggest putting off the HDTV purchase until you get the appropriate programming source for it.
Well I guess that's true, but much of the HD being broadcast OTA is still 4:3 and of course the older shows are. It's rather disapointing to go to WGN's HD channel to watch a Cub's game only to find it's at 4:3. Bears games on WFLD (Fox) or WBBM (CBS) HD look great and are in 16:9. Here in the Chicago area WTTW (PBS) seems to have the most 16:9 HD offerings. That said my Vizio LCD's look decent with Comcast analog cable, but the screen filling WIDE setting is rather distorting, it's Panoramic setting's sides will make your head swim although stuff in the center looks OK. At my other location my older Pansasonic EDTV plasma (Dish box with svideo) looks the most natural with SD using 'Panasonic Auto', but this setting seems to be missing on newer models. Note that Panasonic advises against pillar boxing on their plasmas.
Oh, I see. No OTA here. Only satellite and, since we have our home for sale, we won't upgrade to the HD service yet. Plasmas do indeed have the burn in problem but it's no problem at all to watch 4:3 on the LCD - no harm done. We find that expanding the picture to fill the screen with SD source degrades the images too much. However, I have a new hi-def camcorder which records, of course, widescreen and the std-def DVDs I make with Adobe Premiere Elements play beautifully, full-screen (and no switching necessary) using a Sony "upconverting" DVD player connected via HDMI cable. Recommended.
