Digital cable on an HDTV set PM from pedrohead

**rbinck** · 09-30-2005, 01:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pedrohead

Hello there,
I'm considering buying a 34" 16:9 Panasonic HDTV and had read some of your posts about the quality problems on SD material, especially with digital cable.

I looked at normal analog cable on this set at a friend's house, and didn't think it was too bad. Are you saying that if I move to digital cable (which I have to for HDTV pak in my area) that the stations that I already had in analog cable will get even worse, or is it really only the new stations that I get digitally from the STB that I didn't have before on the analog cable that will be transmitted/received differently, and possibly worse?

I guess I'm confused if getting digital cable will mean that my old analog cable stations will look worse than when it was just analog cable? Or are those analog cable stations going to look the same even coming through a digital cable box (assuming that I do hook up component cable or something of the like)?

Thanks a lot for your help.

It will depend a lot on your cable company. The reason why cable digital channels look worse than the analog is due to the compression artifacts that are introduced by the compression cable companies use. These artifacts are not generally visable on a SDTV set, but when shown on a HDTV will show up much like when you enlarge a digital photo beyond its original resolution. SDTV is at 640x480 pixels and HDTV is either 1280x720 or 1920x1080 pixels in the case of the CRT you are asking about. The larger the TV the more these artifacts will show up, but from what I've seen a small HDTV like the 34" do not show these artifacts all that much. Most people will say the analog TV looks better than the digital though.

Also you can experiment some with the hookup. Component out of the cable box will cause the cable box to convert the 480 line SD to the 1080 line HD output for your TV. Some cable boxes do a poor job of this conversion and it is better to use the composite video output of the cable box and let the TV do the conversion.