Friend in need!

[soundjunkie]

I have a buddy at work who just bought a new Toshiba DLP, 61". Not sure of exact model. I don't think it is the one with the HD tuner. He upgraded his cable to HD, but still only a select few channels are HD. He's really unhappy with the other channels on cable. The picture is quite bad. He bought a HDMI cable to hook his cable box to the TV in hopes that may improve the picture. Still, HD channels look outstanding, but standard def just isn't much to look at.

Is there anything he can do to improve the SD picture? He wanted to buy a Panny HD/DVD recorder, run the cable into it, and then HDMI or DVI out to the TV. I told him that I figured you could set the player to the TV setting, but I didn't know if the player would have any affect on the SD coming into it from cable.

Any advice that I can give him??

 

[Rik]

Would running the feed signal though an AVR that upconverts the signal then sends it to the TV help?

 

[Audioholics]

Tell him to get a CableCard from his cable company. Use that for standard definition. It will vastly improve the picture since the TV will be doing the scaling internally without having the signal go analogue first. I've seen this demoed live at CES this year (by Mitsubishi) and the difference was simply amazing.