If your SDTV reception on your HDTV sucks

[LookatmeABC123]

I have a 37" HDTV that looks awesome on upscaled movies through my computer, but looks like shit running SDTV through the direc TV box...if I buy a tv tuner such as the ATI 650 and have my DTV running to that and just use the TV as a monitor to display the image rather than relying on its own internal tuner, will the image quality be much better on SDTV?

 

[cputeq]

It's possibly a crappy SDTV signal in the first place.


I own a 50" Samsung DLP 1080P, and the Circuit City salesman tried to sell me on digital satellite TV -- I declined. He then showed me what was obviously a "demo" video of what SD would look like on my TV -- it was horrible, but I still declined.


I got the TV home, set up my regular cable TV and turned on the noise filter - the image is awesome. Some of my friends are actually surprised at how good SDTV looks on my setup.

I just run normal Comcast Cable with a 20db 2-way amplifier near the line drop to clean the signal up some (old wires + splitters were weakening the signal too much).


Another tuner *might* help, depending on how good it's noise filters are, but check and make sure there isn't an TV option you're missing or something first.

 

[onlyCOpunk]

SDTV really depends. How many times is the cable split before it reaches your tv and whatnot? Either way of you're in the US you've only got a year left until all TV is digital so you wont have to worry about SDTV anymore. It also matter how you have your Direct TV connected to your TV. Are you using Coax or RCA? If possible you should be using component or hdmi to get the best picture quality from your box. Even if you have to call the company and say you want a box that allows this.

 

[happy medium]

Originally posted by: LookatmeABC123
I have a 37" HDTV that looks awesome on upscaled movies through my computer, but looks like shit running SDTV through the direc TV box...if I buy a tv tuner such as the ATI 650 and have my DTV running to that and just use the TV as a monitor to display the image rather than relying on its own internal tuner, will the image quality be much better on SDTV?

i use the S-video jack on my direct tv box and the picture is much better then the rgb cables on my hdtv.

 

[AmdInside]

I believe it will help. I used to have Comcast cable and would have a PC as a HTPC. An NVIDIA DualTV MCE tv tuner handled my analog signal and I could tell a better picture quality for SDTV coming from my PC than that when the cable was going directly to the tv and my Dell HDTV's tuner handled the decoding.