SD quality issues on Sony XBR4 LCD TV

[enthilzha]

Sage gurus:

Having a problem with standard def image quality over HDMI...

I've had several upgrades to my HTPC setup going on over the past few months. My original setup was SD only using a 27" Samsung tube TV with a Hauppauge SD extender connected via composite inputs. This setup worked fine and continued to work fine when I swapped the Samsung out for a Sony XBR4. I was surprised at how well the XBR4 did displaying the SD extender content via the composite inputs.

Here is my problem: I recently built a Shuttle HTPC to use as an HD Sage Client, Blu-Ray player, and iTunes movie rental box. The Shuttle connects to the LCD via HDMI 1080p. Everything looks great except SD recordings are noticably more pixelated than they were on the old composite connected extender. I'm assuming the problem is that the PC is always outputing 1080p to the TV so I'm relying on the video card's (an ASUS ATI HD3450) ability to filter the video as opposed to the TVs. I've tried Nvidia's and ATI's MPEG2 decoders and they smooth some of the pixelation but it still is noticably worse than my old setup.

Has anyone run into this issue? If you did what did you do about it? All HD content looks AWESOME with my new setup but my cable provider still sends a lot of program via SD so I was hoping to do both in the same box...

[gplasky]

This is the nature of the beast. You're taking a SD picture and scaling it up to a large screen which will only emphasize the defects. Not much you can do about it. You can confirm this by disconnecting it from your HTPC and connect your cable box to your TV directly. Analog will always look worse than HD digital.

Gerry