What is the quality of non-HD broadcast on HDTV screen compared with non-HDTV screen?

What you're asking is hard to quantify. Non HD TV signals are typically 480i but that means nothing really. Most non-HD signals are full of artifacts and noise and in the case of digital cable, over compressed. In other words, they look bad. HD Tv's are so crisp and clean, they show you how bad the source material is.

Older analog TV's hide many of these problems so to most people, the picture will very likely look better than on a fixed-pixel display such as the LCD. It's funny but with most source material, my old Sony 27" console TV looks better than my 46" Sony 1080P LCD (that I also bought from Costco coincidentally)

There are a few LCD's that have a comparable picture to the old tubes but they require a lot of digital processing and therefore cost more. I know this seems a bit counter intuitive.

In case of DVD however, the LCD will look stunning. If I recall correctly, Costco has a HDMI equipped progressive scan DVD player for $50. I think it was a Toshiba or Sharp. That's cheap.

All widescreen TV's allow you different viewing formats to compensate for non-widescreen source material. The most common are "stretch", "letterbox", and "zoom". Stretch makes everything short and fat; Letterbox fits the picture into the screen best it can and fills the blank spaces with black boxes; and Zoom completely fills the screen and cuts off the excess picture. Depending upon the brand of TV, you will be able to change the format while watching or in the setup menu. I do not recommend using the letterbox feature as the continuous black bars will cause a problem caused "burn-in". I usually watch my TV in stretch.

If you ignore all the hype, you may want to wait a bit longer as the prices for LCD continue to drop.

Good Luck!

It will be horrible. The reason is because standard programming is not widescreen, so you are going to stretch the picture, if you dont mind that you also have to worry about the fact the pixels do not line up well enough, in standard TV programming you have 480 pixels per line, on HD you have either 720 or 1080, at 720 you have one and a half pixel for every pixel of 480, and at 1080 you have 2 and a fourth pixels for every pixel. Unless you're buying a Sony Bravia or something like that (2,000 dollars for a 20 inch) that has an extremely good engine (the VVega) that can do things to equal out the picture, i'd not recommend it. A sony VVega CRT screen comes in 34 inches though, it is very heavy (225 pounds) but it has among the best picture you can buy even among LCD's and DLP's and is only about 1,000 dollars. Remember when shopping for HD TV's that the single most important factor is the TV's firmware engine, it will give you the compatability and picture quality and should be considered before what type of pixel you're buying and how close they are together. hope this this helps with your searching.

ok, non -HD programing on a HDTV will be better in most cases. It will depend on the model 27" TV you had. If you had a hi res Sony flat tube TV, then maybe it will be the same. Anything short of that the HDTV will be better broadcasting non-HD content.

Also, all that talk about the picture being worse could depend on how their new HDTV was hooked up to thier old CABLE or Satilite box.

If you plan to use COAX on your new HDTV... then DON'T even bother getting an HDTV. Make sure your cable\sat box supports Composite connections, which is YGB and 2 jacks for Audio (total of 5 connections on the back of your CABLE\SAT box. HDMI will work too, assuming the HDTV has them as well.

in the end,,,,, why get a High Definition TV if you don't even plan to use it? If you want you can buy an non HD LCD TV that is just as thin cool looking and alot cheaper.....

Quality should be about the same

yet if you look close at the screen you would or should

tell the difference because its not an hd signal you are

watching.

similar to listening to a cassette tape then

playing the same song on a cd player

both play the same music but one sounds better and clearer

since you would watch non hd material on an hd set

you can expect it to look worse as its not an hd signal

that doesn't mean the tv is bad just the signal going into

the tv is.

hd tv can't make a non hd signal look perfect

you will see the flaws and fuzzyness of the signal

so be prepared for that

the picture quality on the old set would probably be better for non-hd broadcast because hdtv's are made for hd broadcast the standard definition doesn't look so good on hdtv's compared to old sets trust me i have seen both.my answer to you is don't buy the 32" hdtv lcd for non-hd i would buy the newer modle tube tv like the samsung slim fit,it should display better non hd quality then a hdtv lcd tv.

In order to get HD you have to upgrade your box that is were the $5 comes in .Yes digital channels look better on HD TV's but analog looks worse.