One customer complaint that happens to pop up mostly everywhere on the internet about HDTV televisions is that the image quality when watching standard television programming (SDTV) is lower in quality than that displayed by a regular Tv set. This happens for many reasons. HDTVs use almost three times the amount of pixels that conventional televisions and regular digital Tvs are able to display even at their lowest resolution which is 720i. Conventional television and SD use a significantly lower resolution compared to them. This introduces unwanted artifacts into a set that is trying to display a lower resolution image in higher resolution setting.
The other problem that arises is that SDTV programing or media with the exception of DVDs that are in widescreen format, has an aspect ratio of 4:3 while HDTV televisions usually built to display a 16:9 aspect ratio image. When users try to watch their SD programming in an HD set they experience black block on the sides of the image reducing the overall image size. Some newer sets have a feature which stretches the image to fill the screen of the HDTV television set. Such settings usually give very poor results. The image looks stretched and the overall experience suffers. In summary, not even cables can fix a poor SDTV image on a high definition set.
The only way to get a good image on your HDTV television is to feed it high definition signals. Either from a Blu-Ray disc, HD cable or satellite Tv or use a high definition tuner to decode over the air HD signals. There is simply no way around it. Of course, some people are prepared for this and upgrade their disc players once they purchase their new set. Others are not properly informed and feel misled when they plug in their set and find out there are no improvements in the image quality when they test it with some DVDs. If you are planing to buy one of these marvelous television sets be ready to upgrade your signal sources especially if you want to rent the latest movies in your local video club and get the best possible image. Here is a great resource that you can visit to find a lot of technical infromation about HDTV televisions: http://www.faqhdtv.com/.