Will a hi def tv work properly with non-hi def service?

[Mark Lloyd]

I see some for sale around here. They call them EDTV (non-NTSC input, usually ATSC/QAM tuner, 480-line resolution).

[Bob M.]

Still not true! All TV's sold today are required to have NTSC -and- ATSC tuners, built-in. FCC mandate from a few years ago.

[AZ Nomad]

STILL IRRELEVENT. Having both tuners doesn't make ATSC backward compatible.

I see why you snipped out what I was replying to so that you could take it out of context.

[Rick Brandt]

There are differences in how well hi-def monitors display non-hi-def content. It is not merely a question of stretching the image to the wider format. I read many reviews of hd sets before I bought mine and the reviewer frequently would comment on how some sets were better at displaying non-hi-def content than others were.

[Mark Lloyd]

Besides the (incomplete) fact below, they are requiring OTA broadcasts to be in ATSC. Many will be 480-line (not HDTV).

IF they have any tuners at all.

[DonC]

">> All TV's sold today are required to have NTSC -and- ATSC

Nitpicking: If they have no tuners, they're not TVs -- they're monitors. So all TVs sold today ARE required to have NTSC and ATSC tuners.

[Dave Martindale]

Our local BestBuy has an interesting demo set up. There are a couple of toy cars and figures on a small turntable rotating in front of two Sony camcorders, one SD and one HD. Their video outputs are fed to a Sony HDTV via a selector that lets the viewer select either camcorder. You're supposed to switch between them and see how much better the HD image looks, so you'll buy a HD camcorder instead of an SD one (or to replace your existing SD one).

However, the SD image looks really really awful, not just lower resolution than the HD one, but with all sorts of upsampling artifacts. It looks much worse than a normal SD TV set displaying SD video. What the demo *really* shows is how badly the Sony HDTV handles upsampling the SD content. It shouts to me "don't buy this Sony TV set". Unfortunately, that's probably not the message that most people will get - they'll think the TV is fine and SD is just naturally far inferior to HD.

Dave

[salty]

I was in the consumer electronics field for many years. It was VERY common for retail outlets to disconnect the tweeters in speakers that they didn't want you to buy.

I wouldn't bet that you could make ANY accurate decisions based upon a store demo. It was very likely rigged.

[Mark Lloyd]

And TV isn't the right word here either, DVRs and DVD recorders have the same requirements (regarding tuners).

And what about all that non-HDTV ATSC broadcast? And DVDs too (they're not HD, and not NTSC)?