greg1701
11-20-2009, 08:08 AM
Hello.. I was wondering if anyone had played around with viewing SD channels on your HDTV without the cable box doing any of the conversion... meaning getting a splitter and feeding the coax directly into the tv and viewing them that way...
or..
running composite cables out of the cable box and not using the HDMI.. didn't know if that type of cable worked well with SD.. I'm assuming it does.. but just wondering..
Just trying to improve those pesky SD channels..
Greg
DoctorCAD
11-20-2009, 10:25 AM
Garbage in - Garbage out.
Not much you can do about a low quality signal.
flyfish99
11-20-2009, 11:33 AM
What Dr Cad said. Also, the SD quality seems to be worse on cable systems than on satellite systems. Another thing is screen size.....generally, the smaller the screen the better the image. I have a 19" LCD in my den, and the SD isn't too bad, but the quality is much worse on the 42" LCD in my living room.
Answer to the problem is to watch HD as much as possible. I would never recommend purchasing an LCD or Plasma to watch SD.
Bigloww
11-20-2009, 11:59 AM
Yeap, that pretty much sums it up. 1 Thing I noticed back when I got my 1st 50'' plasma over 3 yeas ago (when HD channels were much fewer) was running a seperate S-video cable for SD channels. It did improve the overall SD PQ slightly over HDMI. But don't expect much.
HiDefRev
11-20-2009, 12:38 PM
You can only stretch 480 lines of interlaced signal so much. As DrCad stated - GIGO ( Garbage In, Garbage Out ). There's nothing you can do about an SD signal. :2cents
08blackrt
11-20-2009, 09:11 PM
One thing I've noticed on my TV was when I was moving things around in the room, and temporarily hooked up a longer old, like 20+ years old hunk of RG-6 from the surge protector to the cable box. No difference in the HD stuff, but SD looked like VHS with all kinds of blurry pics, people's noses "frying", etc. It was instantly seen, and since I had to watch it for a week or so that way, I went to the store and got a brand new 20' RG-6 jumper, and it cured it. I use Rg-6 for my scanners too, and I put that old jumper in from my lightning arrestor to one of the scanners, and it dropped the signal strength about 75%. A lot of stuff that was slightly noisy was totally gone, and other signals were very hissy. I went and replaced all the cable in the house after that, and the SD stuff improved a little bit more. I cut the old cable up and some of it was a bit green inside. I would say 10 years is about as long as it will last.
I played around with some F connector attenuators I had bought years ago, and even the one marked 2db made a noticable difference on SD signals on my LCD TV and my PC with a TV tuner in it too.
