The Old On The New

Ever wonder why regular TV programming looks not so great on your new HDTV set? There are few reasons for that.

Original Material: SD content was shot and produced at a resolution and quality far inferior to what your new equipment is capable of displaying. For example, if a standard show was shot at 320 lines a decade ago, and you attempt to reproduce it on a set capable of 720 or 1080 lines, your TV will fill the gaps in order to offer a full screen image. If it would not do so, you would be watching programming on half of your screen or less.

Image reproduction: When your TV tuner or HD Receiver up converts the image, it gets distorted in the process. And since this distortion is on both horizontal (caused by aspect ratio) and vertical (caused by lines), this creates a grainy and compressed image. Sometimes characters or shapes will appear to be square and details such as facial features will be smudged.

Size: When you purchased that big screen, you probably did not think that it would be possible for it to display so horrible content. Imagine taking a small picture, for example a passport sized one and enlarging it by a few hundred percent. What happens is that each pixel of the original now takes up a lot more canvas and since one pixel can contain only so much detail, the result is a grainy and fuzzy enhancement.