jaggies in a HDTV

[Unregistered]

I just got a good look at some DLP projection TVs this past weekend, both for DVD and for a regular old TV signal. I was very disappointed. A football game that I was watching looked absolutely horrible. I saw what appeard to me as "jpeg jaggies" all over the screen. I assume this is due to the scaling from the low res images to the high-res 1280x720 monitor. What do people say about this? Is it just something that they live with? Are some scalers better than others?

This alone would prevent me from buying a HDTV until the broadcasters and DVD come in a standard high def resolution.

 

[nick_danger]

That's the one and only tragedy about HDTV. I have yet to see a scaler that does a perfect job, but I'm sure someone here knows which does it the best. The source image is just too low-res HDTV, whereas before it was higher-res than your SDTV and looked great.

Lower grade scalers often produce excessive smoothing or uneven smoothing, making the image even worse... I'm not sure what you can do about it. Pray for faster HD broadcast adoption? Anyone?

 

[Audioholics]

The other thing that stinks is when HD cable boxes, etc don't provide a non-HD output so that you can set up an input on your television for this. TWC's SA Explorer 8000HD is like that.

Some scalers are FAR better than others. The other thing that is phenominally cool is the CableCARD technology. If you haven't yet seen the difference, try to locate a display that shows cable being scaled via analogue input and another with a CableCARD (doing the scaling digitally) The difference is phenomenal. Ghosting is reduced and edges are improved (not with bogus edge-enhancement either.) My apologies for not snapping a picture of it at the Mitsubishi booth at CEDIA.

 

[nick_danger]

The other thing that stinks is when HD cable boxes, etc don't provide a non-HD output so that you can set up an input on your television for this.

That's the worst!