HDTV to watch cable...? (1 Viewer)

[Bruce C]

Can a standard 480i cable signal (RF, composite or S-Video) be line doubled or deinterlaced within an HDTV set? Or is that available only for component input? If so, how would I input the cable signal via the component jacks?
Sorry for the primitive question, but it’s important for me to know if HDTV would improve cable viewing by providing higher resolution, and no matter how much I read I just can’t seem to get a handle on the issue.

 

[PaulKH]

Perfectly reasonable question.
Yes, all HDTV-ready sets will upconvert (deinterlace) 480i inputs (composite, s-video, RF, component, RGB) to 480p with varying degrees of quality.
However, this doesn't provide 'higher resolution' as you said, it just means the same data is being output twice as fast for a crisper picture.
Pioneer Elites are known to have the best built in deinterlacers.
Granted, cable TV is generally such poor quality anyway that quibbling over the TVs deinterlacer isn't that important, although it WILL be important if you have an interlaced output only DVD player, but that issue is rapidly going away as more and more DVD players have progressive (480p) output as well.
Hope that helps!

 

[Bruce C]

Yes, it does help, Paul. Thank you. Now the comments I have heard that cable TV can sometimes look worse on an HDTV begin to make some sense.
I think I get a fairly decent cable signal (although I may not know what a really good signal looks like), but you seem to be saying I shouldn't be too disappointed if I see no improvement on an HDTV. I'm wondering, though, if I could at least expect the scan lines to be less visible and not too distracting when viewed on the larger HDTV screen.
I read recently that an HDTV's internal circuitry is not the best place to generate 480p because often it has only a rudimentary line doubler that has to rely on interpolated data. I'm hoping this statement is outdated. The Toshiba web site, for example, says that their H81 series HDTVs have something called "Cinema Mode (3/2 Pull Down)." I'm not sure whether 3/2 pulldown is relevant to a cable signal, but it sounds as if Toshiba may at least have a decent deinterlacer.
By the way, I happen to have an early Sony DVD player without component outputs. It would be interesting to see how its interlaced output might be improved with Toshiba's 3/2 pulldown progressive scanning.
Thanks again.

 

[PaulKH]

A TV's deinterlacer will get rid of the annoying black scan retrace you see on interlaced TVs.
The main reason cable usually looks worse on HDTVs is they're generally bigger than most people are used to. On a tiny monitor or say in a window on a PC, even crappy video can look great. Blow it up to 4 or 5 feet across, and it can look like $#!+. YMMV.
And the comment about TV deinterlacers not being that great is generally true. Don't know about the MOST recent mainstream HDTVs though. As I said before - the Pioneer Elite is respected as having an excellent in TV deinterlacer, that also does (optionally) 3:2 pull down.
[Edited last by Paul Higginbottom on November 04, 2001 at 06:59 PM]