How do you handle customers who are dissapointed with SD images when they move up to a HD set.

I'm not talking about the overall resolution. I'm talking about all the artifacts that seem to get added into the SD images. It's almost like a film over the picture.

You might want to ask this on the Custom Installers forum for a greater response but usually the problems are related seeing the poor SD signal on a bigger screen. The artifacts are inherent in the SD signal but are less noticeable on a smaller screen SDTV. There are any number of factors that could influence this, depending on the quality of the source or upscaling that's going on from either the source or the display.

Mike
www.SurfRemoteControl.com

This has also been addressed several times in the Custom Installers or Cable, Sat and HDTV (or whatever it's called) Forums.

I see a couple of causes.
Yes, the image is larger in most cases, so bad-looking details are now visible
I don't think most of the current displays have put their money into the NTSC display portion of the set, so that image does not look as good as it could. It was especially bad in the early LCD RPTVs, where a thing called "screen door" occurred. When you had that, you would notice that different parts of the image were at different brightnesses, sort of in rectangular patterns. Then the camera would move but the dark and light areas would stay the same and you would realize it was a display flaw! Both the cable guy and the Sony Factory guy said "Yesh, that's how they look." They are better now, but still not as good as the HD sections of the display.

Solution: save up and get an A/V receiver that will upconvert NTSC to component. They were all just making 480i NTSC into 480i Component, but this means you can plug it into the better part of the display. And I hear some receivers now also convert to 480p.

For a comparison of the concept here, notice how crappy the AM sounds on your $2000 A/V receiver -- because the manufacturer looks on it as passe technology not worthy of more than a buck ninety-five. It's easy to make AM sound pretty good, but it takes more than two bucks.

I already tried this and didn't see any improvement in picture quality. I have a Denon 3805 and I input my HR10-250 to the Denon via component and then output it via component to my Panasonic TH-50PX50U Plasma.

The SD pictures look the same as they did when I had the HR10-250 outputting to the Plasma via HDMI.

I have the ADS Tech HDTV UpConverter (HDUP1500) and it helps. I'm not sure if it's still available but I've seen them on eBay.