Why does standard-definition programming look poor on my big screen HDTV?
A clean, strong standard-definition signal should look OK on an HDTV. If it doesn’t, these factors be partly or entirely responsible: First, signal problems you never noticed on a small screen are magnified on a large one. And your high-definition TV will not increase the resolution of a standard-definition signal. Second, big-screen TVs generally have larger pixels, and are meant to be seen from farther away than small screen TVs. A weak “snowy” picture will be more noticeable. Third, if the standard-definition program you’re talking about is conventional analog, your HDTV must convert it to a digital signal and scale the image information to suit the digital display’s native resolution. With this conversion, the noisy signal of a weak channel leads to visible, unwanted artifacts, such as a fuzzy picture. Try enabling the “digital (video) noise filter” on the TV, if it has it – though it may cause fast motion be blurred. Fourth, there are some general limitations to some of the newer
