My first HDTV, some questions.

[Space_Coyote]

I just won my first ever HDTV at work on Friday, and I’m pretty stoked. I have a couple of questions though. It’s not big enough for the main room, so we’re using it in the bedroom. It looks okay from the bed but, without HD cable, it obviously looks terrible if you get close.

We have Comcast digital cable boxes. Will the digital changeover in Feb affect the regular picture quality at all? I’m told they use analog right now, even on their ‘digital’ cable, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’ll probably get an HD box anyway, but was mostly just curious.

How big a difference will an upconverting DVD player make? I’m not ready to make the move to Blu-ray, and we have TONS of DVD’s I’d like to get better results from.

Lastly regards the aspect ratio, there only seems to be 2 plausible options. I like full screen best, but it’s a little stretched. The 4:3 is too small, and only uses about half the screen it seems. If/when I get the HD receiver and use the HDMI input, will that have the same issue I’ve described? What do you guys do?

 

[Digital Viper-X-]

from my own experience I can say that Normal DVDS look great even on HDTVs when upconverted well, like on my XBOX 360, or pc played onto my tv at 1080p, the picture still looks good.

 

[Thejavaman1]

Comcast Digital Cable is already digital it's just SD. Your options for HD are 1) pay comcast for a HD box 2) if your TV has a QAM tuner run a cable into the coax connection on the TV or get an antenna and then you'll get HD locals (network) so no HD TNT or any of that. If you go with option 2, you'll still need your set top box for most of the channels (at least in my experience with Comcast).