[dgh]

If you think the picture is bad on a 30" HD, don't ever try looking at it on something over 50"!!

It should be OK if you double the distance. NTSC was designed to be viewed at 7-10 times the screen height. HD can be viewed at 3 times the screen height. But if you put NTSC - let alone digitized compressed (by a consumer-priced real-time encoder) NTSC on a screen and view it at 3 times the screen height, that's going to hurt a bit.

However, once the screen has been calibrated, most people say it then looks "OK". Not good, let alone great, but tolerable until they can get rid of NTSC altogether.