LCD picture quality

Jackofall1

Depending on where you live, purchasing a HD antena may be the answer, you can look at www.tvfool.com to see what broadcast antena's are near you and determine what kind of antena you may need.

"Over the Air" HD quality is literaly awesome and far surpasses cable, dish, DTV.

Mark

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AllanJ

An "HD" TV antenna is the same as a "UHF" antenna, the elements range from 3 to 6 inches long. But a few (HDTV) TV stations these days still use VHF frequencies (channels 2-13) where the proper antenna elements are about 3 feet long.

If you have long relied on over the air TV, on average you will need a better antenna than the one you used to get comparable reception of today's digital channels, and freedom from checkerboarding and blue screening, compared with snow on yesteryear's analog broadcasts.

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The Cable Guy

Best bet would be to bite the bullet and upgrade to the Dish HD. They are offering their "free HD for life" deal...I believe that involves either paying a one time 99 dollar fee, OR signing up for auto pay (I do not believe there is any fee at all involved in this). You would have to sign another 2 year service agreement (not to mention that you would need a Dish installer to come out and upgrade your Dish to 1000.2 LNBF), but take it from a guy who has installed Dish for years (but now installs for Comcast...shh), Dish is the superior HD service right now. Get yourself a 722 receiver, you won't regret it.

Also, a purchase of an HD off air antenna from Wal-Mart isn't a bad investment (they run cheap)...just plug it into the Ant In port on the back of your LCD TV (coax input), and have your tv autoscan the off air digital and HD channels. You CAN hook the off air antenna into the back of most Dish receivers as well (there is a coax port for off air antenna in), and have the Dish receiver do the scan for you (most Dish receivers will put the local stations picked up off of the antenna right into the interactive program guide, and will allow you to set the DVR to grab shows off of those stations). Only drawback is that since your current Dish receiver is not an HD receiver, it will not display anything in HD.

As far as the other recommendations about the converters...I have never seen one of those work out well (picture DOES improve, but on an LCD you won't be very impressed, and they are much more pricey than just upgrading through Dish).

Hope this helps.

AllanJ

ATSC converters with component and/or HDMI output (and usually costing more than $150.) can deliver picture quality equal to digital HD cable or dish HD cable. Quality is usually better if the converter outputs video at the same "speed" (resolution) as the broadcast compared with outputting at a constant speed such as always 1080i or always 720p.

Converters costing under $50. almost always have just yellow and antenna video ouputs and the quality is at best equal to locally received older (analog) broadcasts.

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The disadvantages of crab apple trees. In summer, the apples are too sour to pick and eat. In winter the birds come and leave dropping all over the place.

lendosky

I have dish with a slingbox adapter and can watch my tv on my android phone! Buy the HD receiver, you're eventually going to do it anyways and spending money to avoid a inevitable cost is...well not cost efficient. also, hdmi is awesome. dish came with the component cables but I purchased 5 hdmi cables off of some website for $4 each including shipping and used that single cable instead of the 5. it made fishing the cable through the wall much easier, the picture clearer and the sound better. now, if you weren't used to dish or cable and wanted to save some bucks I would get the hd antenna and install it in your attic with a splitter and an amplifier and run the rg6 to every room in the house. the picture is better than dish because it is never compressed but you must live in a metro area. in my second home here in Phoenix I have that exact setup and it's amazing. good luck

JPL

Get an HD receiver. Video is basically GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. A $150 scaler for composite to component, or worse yet, hdmi would be a waste of $150. You could spend 500-1000 bucks on an AVR that will scale and switch sources. Getting an HD receiver is the best way to go, no mater what you do in the future.

GA Squid

Unless you opt for the HD package using the S-video or composite is your only choice and spending money on some adaptor to convert to HDMI is worthless since the signal from the receiver is still non-HD. The 5 wire component inputs will work for any HD signal (over air, cable, sat) and while the single HDMI cable makes for a cleaner install it really only matters when you are talking Blueray or PS2 that output true HD at 1080p. Most "HD" sources send 1080i or 720p and the component input is fine for this. Personally i have a 65" Panasonic plasma and use HDMI for my Blueray player, PC, but my HD cable and my Xbox 360 run on component and all look great with the Blueray obviously looking the best.