TV Quality Conspiracy

Last week my cable/satellite subscription reverted to non HDTV subscription and I was confused that the quality was worse than I remember. Worse than I remember my whole life of color TV (1976 on-wards).

It was blurry, hard to watch and it made me think, are TV companies gradually downgrading old vision to push the sale of HD and now 4K TVs and the ancillary hardware and stuff.

There is no way now, I will have a non HD subscription as on the same "plasma" the HD is perfectly fine for me, but the other in un watchable.

And now 4K comes out, and i think after watching it, 4K is an unreal resolution, it is better than the eye can see insomuch that the colours and shadows and definitions are fake and better than the eye would see normally.

Once we are programmed 4K, HD will go the way of early TV.

Now I do not deny 4K is awesome and better than HD but what I am saying is a bit like the Mandela Effect.

Was TV as bad as none HD and we have been conditioned to HD or have those in industry gradually degraded non HD to a point worse than it was before HD and the pixel race was the technology critical path?

a reply to: Forensick

Well, you know...

a reply to: Forensick

no idea - i gave up on TV years ago

BUT - could your HDTV set be to " blame " ? it is " fine tuned " to deliver the best delivery of HDTV signal it can - which has a set pixel size etc etc etc

so - running non HD signals through it - may cause " issues " as its not supposted to be used for the input its now getting

???????????

originally posted by: ignorant_ape
a reply to: Forensick

no idea - i gave up on TV years ago

BUT - could your HDTV set be to " blame " ? it is " fine tuned " to deliver the best delivery of HDTV signal it can - which has a set pixel size etc etc etc

so - running non HD signals through it - may cause " issues " as its not supposted to be used for the input its now getting

???????????

It could be, but my same TV on standard cheap ass Digital set to box with an "aerial" is better quality than (in Aus Sattelite TV or Cable TV ets is referred to as Foxtel, in the UK its SKY) standard foxtel in my experience.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Forensick

Well, you know...

In my head, despite 'respecting' your great contributions on many threads i watch, I immediately discredited you and raged a little about your post, before taking a breath and reading again and watching (a bit of) the link!

You need to be careful of being too subtle!

That is exactly what I am suggesting may be happening, that or the grey matter dies.

originally posted by: ignorant_ape
a reply to: Forensick

no idea - i gave up on TV years ago

BUT - could your HDTV set be to " blame " ? it is " fine tuned " to deliver the best delivery of HDTV signal it can - which has a set pixel size etc etc etc

so - running non HD signals through it - may cause " issues " as its not supposted to be used for the input its now getting

???????????

This was my first thought. Modern TVs are much more complicated than the old CRT TVs.

Some may attempt to interpolate frames, so the incoming signal may only be ~30 frames per second, the TV may try to interpolate (predict, essentially) a frame in between each actual frame to make it seem like ~60 frames per second. I don't know if TVs work that way or not, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Another thing that could be possible is the non-HD (lower resolution) broadcast is being upsampled to the resolution of your TV, which would also require some pixel interpolation and would result in a lower quality.

Finally, there are other issues I've heard about with new TVs when you try to play old gaming consoles on them, like the original NES or an Atari 2600 or something. I don't know exactly what the problem is but they make an additional piece of hardware you put between the console and your TV that helps. So there's obviously something wrong with the way the TV handles the signals those consoles are outputting, something that worked fine on CRT televisions 20-30+ years ago but now has to be corrected for modern TVs.

a reply to: Forensick

Why are you still watching TV?? I haven't watched the trash box in 8 years! Turn it off..

a reply to: Phage

Beautiful.

And I take it you mean "forced upgrade"! And I suspect they will do that with automobiles as well.

a reply to: Forensick

It's worse quality than you remember. Resolution doesn't strictly apply to analog TV but it was roughly a resolution of 480. The thing is, the TV's of that time were designed to display that resolution. If you stretch a low resolution image over a higher resolution display the upscaling makes it look much worse.

It's not a conspiracy on the part of TV companies, that's just how image displays function. Even 720 will look pretty bad on a 4k TV.

You said that you did have HD prior to the regular cable, so your TV was probably connected to the cable box /outlet with an HDMI cable correct?
HDMI cables were not intended for the transfer of regular signals, though they can do it. Try switching back to the old coaxial or AV cables, and that should clear it up for you.

something that cheeses me off is the tv reception cable and over antenna and wifi. a stadard digital antenna for 20 dollars gets you blotchy tv especially during day time or inclement weather now if you buy a 90 dollar antenna it doesn't drop off as much but that one has to be plugged into a power supply. cable in my area is time warner the main box in living plays fine for the most part but the other boxes in other two rooms play like wifi tv glitchy blocky going in and out like a lagging video game. the wifi stuff netflixs and hulu and all that if ran through built in wifi has loading and lagging issues but if i run it through alaptop it works much better. old analog tv i never had problems with rabbit ears. why is digital hd so much worse and we are supposed to be ok with it.