It seems that TV manufacturers are cheaping out on the NTSC portion of TVs these days, and those images look bad in general. We have made a point of using A/V receivers that upconvert NTSC to 480i component, and some now do 480p component. While that does not improve the quality of the original image, it plugs it into the section of the TV that the manufacturer took the trouble to make work correctly, so the picture looks better. If you aren't looking along the line of an A/V receiver, maybe an upconverter, transcoder, whatever, that can probably be gotten in the $300 - $500 range can make your TV look as good as it can.