Buying an LCD and need some advice.

[Kevin H]

Ok it's time to upgrade my old 19" CRT in my bedroom to an LCD. I'm thinking about the Samsung LN-S2738D. Amazing picture. Anyway my main concern is non HD programming. Will non HD broadcasts look grainy or is there a way to improve the picture when a channel isn't HD.

Thanks

[topspeed]

Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do. ED looks like crap on HD sets, particularly lcd's. The HD set is trying to scale information that simply isn't there. IMO, plasma does the best with ED programming, followed by LCoS and DLP. None, however, can touch CRT.

[Kevin H]

Thanks. Yeah I'm leaning toward CRTs more & more. They are able to accept all broadcasts and still look good. Not to pricey either.

[edtyct]

Speedy's right. Although some digital TVs do better than others when showing non-HD material, most of them show a huge drop-off with content that falls beneath their native resolution (and especially beneath that of standard DVD). As Speedy says, all of the fixed-pixel displays have to scale this material to fit the screen, which means blowing it up, via interpolation logarithms, to sizes that can't help magnifying its flaws and adding new ones. CRT's theoretical advantage is its ability to show this material natively by scanning the lines exactly as presented (in the case of 480, anyway), but large CRTs suffer with poor broadcast material, too. One remedy, which won't appeal to many people, is to buy a small digital display, since the blemishes aren't as noticeable on them. If you're replacing a 19" CRT, maybe a 21 to 26" LCD would work for you. Another remedy if the TV is going to be large or if you're going to sit on top of it is an external scaler/processor, but a good one can set you back as much as the TV itself, if not more. One last recourse is to consider only TVs with processing that looks good to you, but they might turn out to be the most expensive or not necessarily as good with other picture/feature elements.