Originally Posted by Winston

I am an SD user who, increasingly, has been invited to friends homes to view their "super deluxe" new HD installations. They rave (as well they must after spending $5,000) while I try to mask my grimace.

Possibly we could ignore poor SD quality arguing that SD is a dinosaur soon to be extinct. But will it really be extinct? I, for one, have a substantial collection of home videos that, now, with the advent of excellent computer editing software (Pinnacle/Avid Liquid) - - that I am finally committing to DVD and distributing to other family members. And while I’ll not take the same ‘approach’ as one other writer to this thread (who sees himself being placed, soon I gather, in a casket) . . . it is possible that SD will be with me the rest of my life (and that of my children?).

So my first inquiry is one of how to display SD images on HD monitors - - with quality. Now let me limit my inquiry - - having read every post to this thread, it is clear that video compression is destroying much of the quality of broadcast video, particularly over the cable and satellite, and once the signal has been destroyed, there is little that we, as consumers, can do to recapture the quality. (And I’d like to thank Moderator Rbinck for his photos that too accurately depict the degeneration of video quality occasioned by compression.).

But as another thread commentator, InterceptPoint, noted, this compression cannot justify the generally poor performance of HD monitors when connected directly to a local source of video (e.g. my home video creations) or to standard SD broadcasts. Clearly, as InterceptPoint put it, there is something else going on.

And the answer may simply be in the scan conversion algorythms used to convert NTSC to 1080i/p. But, again repeating IP, how difficult can it be to multiply 480 lines by 2? I do not expect my SD video to look any better on an HD monitor, but I do expect it to look no worse. We use the term “lossless” to describe compression algorythms that do not destroy the inherent picture information/quality - - in that vernacular, I am looking for a ‘lossless’ way of displaying SD video on an HD monitor (TV). And on a related point, does anyone know of software that can convert SD video to HD?

My second inquiry for this thread is more a statement or rhetorical. It seems (based on my limited observations of DirectTV HD satellite) that the improved quality of the higher resolution is nearly completely offset by the distortions/artifacts of compression. I’m told to sit further from the TV . . . but even at a distance I find the compression to be objectionable. And what’s the advantage of a large screen if one has to sit so far - - that the screen becomes ‘small to the view’?