Sadly, you probably were not shown NTSC on that TV in the showroom before you bought it. Since there is still so much NTSC out there in videotapes and plain old satellite receivers and cable boxes, not showing those signals is about the closest thing to hornswoggling I've seen in years.

I think the TV manufacturers are not putting much money into making SD, that is plain old NTSC, look good. It is comparable to AM radio; there were some GREAT sounding AM radios, and I once had one that pulled in Chicago (I'm in L.A.), but once FM and its obvious high fidelity appeal came in, well, anybody listen to the AM quality on a flagship A/V receiver lately?

DirecTV is definitely digital, but its transmission of NTSC analog pictures is much like playing 78 rpm records on FM. You can hear the noise in great hi fi, and sometimes the recording quality sucks. To see the best that SD can look, keep watching the HD channels, especially network programming (where, unfortunately, DirecTV has not got much going for it). SD looks pretty good on an HD channel.

But HD coming out of a satellite box on the channel 3, analog $2.50 modulator inside a satellite receiver will look better on a TV tube than the best DirecTV non-HD channel on most new HDTVs...on their analog inputs. And a couple of generations ago, it looked even worse!

Hopefully you are soon to be in the position to get or change to a new A/V receiver, which will upconvert NTSC to 4801 or even 480p component, so you won't have to use the crummy part of your TV to show those programs.