New TV - question

[HLAuburn]

Just bought a new, larger TV for our living room (just HD, not a 4K). The picture is great when the channel is high def, but the "regular" channels that don't come in HD (like Sprout, for instance) are pretty bad - it's like every imperfection is magnified! We have cable (Comcast) with an HD box and it's hooked up with an HDMI cable.

I'm not too tech savvy obviously...so here are my questions:
- What would cause this? Is it just that the picture is not "optimized" for a newer, HD TV?
- Do HD versions exist for all channels, just not on Comcast? (Would DirectTV be better?)
- Is there anything I can do to make the picture better on non-HD channels?

Any advice would be appreciated

Thanks!

 

[HM]

Does your cable box allow your TV the choice of picture quality? You may have it set for a high pixel rate and need a lower one for those channels; instead of 1080p you need 720p. You should be able to set up either the cable box/tv to automatically change the rate depending on the channel. Look for this under settings/picture. I hope that makes sense?

 

[tvguy]

Not much you can do. A standard definition channel will always be a standard definition channel. And more importantly, even if a channel is High Definition, not every show on that channel will be HD.
The only option to improve the SD signal slightly (and this would improve HD also) is to go to the setup menu on the TV and turn off the "Energy Star" mode. Some TV menus call this option "Demo" mode or "Store Mode". Dirty little secret, this is the setting the demo sets in the store use to make the picture look better but it uses more power.

 

[hydrotony]

Sounds like I am about as tech savvy as you and also see this problem. Old TV shows were 4:3 ratio and new TV is 16:9 ratio. To fit old shows to new TVs, they enlarge the picture and crop the top and bottom. Old shows were also (IIRC) 480i and new TVs are 1080i which is the number of pixels in a row. So big TVs really show the differences in resolution. There are settings on TVs which may let you set the resolution i.e. 480, 720 or 1080 which helps by making the picture smaller (big black boarder around picture.)