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I watch over-the-air SD on my cheap Dynex fairly regularly. It looks.. .okay- not as good as HD, of course, but not terrible. It's definitely slightly muddy, though. Whoever makes cheapo HDTVs isn't spending much of their limited budget working on the software that upscales SDTV to HDTV, I'd guess.
That said, my dad's 42" super-nice Sony plasma looks fantastic with SD TV. Better than his previous giant CRT, for sure.
If I were you, I would return it. It doesn't sound like you've had it long, and if you have the original box and whatnot you should be able to do that. Go for a Samsung, like ND says, if you can afford it. The software inside the TV is likely to be significantly better, so SDTV will be much more clear, and you'll get better video quality on the HDTV stuff as an extra bonus. When I move to a bigger apartment, the Dynex is becoming the bedroom TV and my main TV will probably be a Samsung.
My standard definition TV looks better on my new HD than my old CRT. I would return what you have, because it shouldn't be that much trouble to get a good picture out of it.
Hm. My setup right now is satellite tv coming into the television through their DVR. If the incoming signal were the problem, I probably would have had it with the old tv too. And my sister does have the same tv, and I've only watched it once, but I didn't see this problem. Maybe the set itself is a dud.
I just put in a DVD. The picture is better, but I'm still not real impressed. I think I'll go with the plan of moving this one to the bedroom for movie watching, and buy a Samsung for the living room. (I wanted a Samsung in the first place. Never let your sister talk you into buying the cheapest option.)
What kind of cables are connecting your TV to the DVR? When AT&T hooked up my DVR, they used that single yellow cable and the picture wasn't very good. When I changed them to component cables, the picture improved dramatically.
Yeah, I had this weird buzzing on my TV that I thought had to do with the DVR. I tried different cable set-ups but nothing worked, until I simply used both the RF and Audio/Video terminals, which should have been redundant, but it worked, so, okay.
Yellow/white cables. Audio and video?
Yellow is video. White would be audio. If there are two channels of audio (i.e. stereo) you'd also have a red cable for the other channel.
OK, that's what I thought. I have a red/yellow/white cable around here somewhere, but if the red is also audio, it won't help my problem.
Eh. I'm dropping cable now that Leverage is done for the season; I'll be watching everything on my laptop for a while anyway.
Ya, that sounds like composite video. Low def option. You would want the 5-RCA's (well, 3 are video, 2 are audio) that is Component. Not sure what inputs your tv has, and what outputs your cable box has.
HP to iPad fans: buy the fuller-featured Slate for the same price
There's a storm brewin' on the horizon, folks. Apple seems poised to set the pace when it comes to tablet computing in much the same way that the company led the touchscreen handheld market with the iPhone. This time, however, rival PC companies have time to prepare — and HP is looking to lock horns with Apple right out of the gate.
The HP Slate (modeled above by Microsoft big cheese Steve Ballmer) is the iPad's most visible contender at the moment. And what a contender it's shaping up to be, now that HP is looking to play ball at the same low price point that Apple has commit to. It's not official, though HP is making some noise that the company could sell its Slate — which features a full-on version of Windows 7 as well as a cellular connection — for less than the $630 of the equivalent iPad. When you take into consideration that the iPad doesn't feature all of the accoutrements of Apple's own OS, then HP's offer is all the more alluring.
