Widescreen HD TV w/ HDVR2

RayJ said:

1. Am I wrong to wait?

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My answer would be NO, but then again I really don't have a burning need to purchase HD, except maybe NFL football. And I really don't want to purchase and watch the lower cost more capable HD equipment being released over the next couple of years, which would mean that I might be tempted to upgrade again and spend more money again to keep up with current available technology, like 1080p. So, in my case I am waiting until 2009 to make the jump. I have done the same with computer technology over the years and I have always waited until what I have viewed as a sweet spot in technology advanced before making a big change in equipment, and sometimes I have made the jump correctly and sometimes not. Back in 1997, I made the jump to ATX cases and I am still using them today. In 1998, I bought some ASUS P2B motherboards and they still are running today, although they starting to getting a little long in the tooth. And I have started to learn to never buy into leading edge technology too early, because in computer hardware I always buy the best price performance hardware that exists at the time I buy equipment. In other words, I wouldn’t buy a 975X chipset motherboard with an Intel 950 series processor, because I would be paying far too much to have the top of the line performance, although I might buy a 955X chipset motherboard from ASUS with a 600 series processor.

RayJ said:

2. Are there some models better suited to displaying SD TiVo output than others? What should I expect in terms of PQ, etc.

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I hope you get an answer to this question, because I know a lot of HDTV's even with DETUNING show the ills of SD broadcasts.

Well... part of the PQ depends on the tivo vs the directv tuner. I've read that what you get from a DirecTivo unit is pretty much identical to a DTV without tivo box. Keep in mind that for the most part, SD programming degrades visually quite a bit when on an HDTV... even if the tv is tweaked to optimize the PQ for that TV. And the bigger the TV, the more obvious the visual problems can be.

This was my one big disapointment when I got my Sony 42" A10 unit. The PQ of my DTV signal that had been amazing and crisp was now a muddy artifacted mess. I have since gotten it looking better (but not acceptable to me). It's actually caused me to avoid most SD content for the time being as a result.

THe A10's are supposed to be excellent at handling SD content. But once I saw what it looked like, I was not happy with it. I've seen what the local cable content thru a DSTB looks on a 37" Sharp Aquos and it looks very similar poor quality when on digital channels.

But, the OTA SD channels on mine look better when tuned correctly than the DTV signal. GO figure. I assume becaue there's no compression to cause artifacting.

I had recently tried to photograph the tv in action to show the fuzzy PQ but couldnt get a pic that really showed. But its sure noticable in person.

The main reason it does look so bad is, from what I undestand, due to the fact that SDTVs are such lower res, and tend to smooth things out a bit... vs the HDTV which is digital and, for the most part just blows the image up and puts it on the screen, artifacts then stand out because they are not smoothed or hidden by the lower resolution of the tv as with SD.

It's similar to what you see if you run a DTV tuner into a SD tuner card on a PC and into a larger display or lCD. Only much more pronounced.