"James Sweet" writes:


This is simply not true. Properly converted signals look quite good on
high quality LCD sets as they do on other technologies. Lousy
conversions, overcompressed video, or low resolution noisy sources look
bad on any technology. Analog CRTs often look "better" with lousy sources
because they do not reveal as much detail and soften the crap.


I work in the industry, we have a LOT of LCD, DLP, plasma, CRT, you name it
sets of brands ranging from low end junk to high end stuff, and a lot of
different SD and HD sources. I have yet to see an LCD, DLP, or to a slightly
lesser extent, plasma set that looked as good displaying SD content as an SD
CRT. When you scale video on a display that has rigidly defined pixels, you
WILL get artifacts. Some scaling looks much better than others, but it still
looks scaled. A good plasma set displaying high quality HD content at the
native resolution looks stunning, but display SD content that looks fine on
an SD display and it looks awful. The same effect can be clearly seen with
an LCD computer monitor, set it to a non-native resolution and it looks bad
to horrible depending on the quality of the monitor, but run it at the
native res and it looks razor sharp.

Whatever the reason behind it, in the real world, typical SD content looks
bad on flat panel HD sets, it looks significantly better on an LCD SD set
than LCD HD set, but it looks best on a CRT. Whether that's because the CRT
doesn't reveal as much detail or not is irrelevant, it looks better.

The CRT is capable of doing a better job of scaling the image since
it can change the actual number of scan lines, and has no discrete grid
in the horizontal direction - as long as the shadowmask or aperture grille
pitch is sufficiently finer than the raster/pixel pitch.

--- sam | Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ: http://www.repairfaq.org/
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