(also posted in 4CR’s forum)

I’m hoping someone knows a little about HDTV, because the whole HDTV world has just become very disappointing for me, and I’m wondering if I’m missing something.

A friend of mine just bought himself a HD-ready 31″ LCD TV. He’s been wanting to take the plunge, and he did yesterday because Fry’s had a sale on the one he wanted. Now, he’s trying to decide whether to keep it or not.

The problem is that everything that we’ve connected to it has this sort of murky, mpeg-compressed look to it. Except the computer, which was connected via VGA. Mario Sunshine on Gamecube, connected through composite video, looked really bad, as if the game had been recorded on an old video cassette and played back. Switching to S-video, the picture became a little better, but looked sort of like an N64 game. There were compression artifacts around everything.

Next, we decided to try Halo 2 on the Xbox, since it has component out, which we thought would look a lot better. Unfortuantely, it didn’t. The Xbox was all set up for widescreen, 16:9, 480p, but the picture still had those artifacts. And, I expected this, but the game looked much worse for being on HD. Edges of polygons were all pointy and jagged, the graphics in general looked like they were last-gen.

Next, we tried some DVDs, Pearl Harbor and SW: Episode 1 on component out. They looked awful as well, with artifacts all around.

So, my question is, are we missing something, or does HDTV just not really look all that great? I know we’re not using any HD things, though the Xbox and DVDs seem like they should have looked better. Does the fact that the TV is “HD ready” mean that we need to get something additional to make things look good?

The TV’s only good application is as a huge computer monitor, and it fills that role beautifully, probably since it connects through VGA. If we had a VGA box, or a video-input on the computer, could we connect things to it and have a clear picture? (I think we have a Dreamcast with VGA connecter around, we should try that.)

He’s still in a quandary about it, because it does have potential for when real HD applications come about. Also, it does make one heck of a monitor. Watching anime and running emulators and some PC games on it was truly a sight, and begins to justify keeping it. I’ve told him to just keep his old TV and the HDTV, but he wants to ditch the old one so he can have more room in his room.