question about LCD tvs

[Wich0]

I'm thinking of getting either a 32" or 37" LCD HDTV for Christmas. I've been to many stores and have seen many great deals on them. There is only one thing stopping me from buying one and that is the quality of non HD playback. I know that LCDs have a native resolution and that if you run it differently everything looks bad. I noticed that when you play non HD stuff like normal tv or a regular dvd, it looks like ***, you can see the pixels etc. I was wondering if this is true for all models of LCD tvs, should I just get a regular DLP TV? I ask this because 80% of my TV viewing would be non HD quality (regular tv and dvds) and I don't want it to look BAD.

 

[omega-x]

modern tv's have good scalers.
ATI's scaler chip is pretty close to greatness.

and its not so much it makes it look worse, as it shows it for what it truly is, overcompressed detail-less crap. which looks great on sdtv because its made to.

 

[artmonkey]

I'm thinking of getting either a 32" or 37" LCD HDTV for Christmas. I've been to many stores and have seen many great deals on them. There is only one thing stopping me from buying one and that is the quality of non HD playback. I know that LCDs have a native resolution and that if you run it differently everything looks bad. I noticed that when you play non HD stuff like normal tv or a regular dvd, it looks like ***, you can see the pixels etc. I was wondering if this is true for all models of LCD tvs, should I just get a regular DLP TV? I ask this because 80% of my TV viewing would be non HD quality (regular tv and dvds) and I don't want it to look BAD.

This is an issue with cheaper LCDs at the moment, some of the better ones have good upscalers. You could of course buy one that doesn't upscale very well like Sony's X2000 range (and most LCDs at the moment to be honest) and then just buy an upscaling 'AV Reciever' from Denon, Yamaha or Pioneer etc. Some high end DVD players or new HD players also do pretty good upscaling but a good 'AV Reciever' will upscale everything and just send it through a single HDMI to your TV @ 1080p... sweeet =). Of course I don't know exactly what you want it to do but this should be enough for you to continue your home work.