| Re: Watch HD on an SD CRT?
The answer to that is, depends on what you're watching and the tuner involved.
Bleak House, Criminal Justice series 1 (with a man on trial not a woman) and Attenborough's Life are two examples where even though it's a Freeview tuner on BBC1 and a DVD XP recording, it's certainly at the peak of that format's picture quality though a HD set would be different, wider but not automatically better if for example, you're sat too close and would get artifacts that a CRT would be too soft to show.
On both the CRTs I watched it on, you could see the blacker than blacks and the starkly crisp whites of the sky shots in Bleak House, though no other detail to really show it was better in HD.
In Life, when watching the satellite imagery in Episode 3 about Dolphin fishing methods, or Ep2 about the snake mating rituals again no jaggies on a CRT when it was showing the plumes of dust on the sea bed thrown up by the dolphins (fast moving water) but despite looking like the snakes are coming out of the screen in places on the LCD, (great filming), still some artifacts if sat in the wrong place. Again not a problem with a CRT. Again, you're "missing" the extra resolution but on BBC1, a TFT would be better on paper with technical specs side by side, but it doesn't matter if you're happy with what you're seeing. The BBC4 repeat that might not be the full Freeview strength and have an annoying logo, is another story.
Criminal Justice, whatever they did to this it was also well filmed - as an experiment I recorded one of the episodes on the 8hr EP setting- it looked like DVD quality rather than total Legoland when scaled from its original HD, and still no jaggies or noise whatsoever. Whatever circuitry differences there are between Sony TV and Panny DVD Recorder Freeview Tuners, it's the Sony that's winning in this example. I know that it would look mindblowing if I ditched the CRT and went flat before I needed to but in some cases, I'm fine with not getting total ultra-sharpness. I think when the time comes the CRT will be in another room for watching old video stuff where it looks best.
Last edited by NethLyn; 08-11-2009 at 9:59 PM.
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