Why do my tapes look so bad??
 

I was recently given a small 19 inch plasma from my grandpa so "I could get rid of the old hunk of junk" that I am using now. I thought I would give it a chance and see how good it works. The opver air signal has amazing picture quality but when ever I switch it to VHS or a laser disc the picture just looks absolutly horrible but when I try it agan on the old zenith from 1983 they look fantastic with rich colors and theyre plenty sharp where as with the flat trash they look blurry and flat:no:
Why do flat panels do that?

Are you sure it's a Plasma? Never heard of a 19" Plasma, maybe LCD?

Anyhow as to your question, I don't really know, I think it's because the set isn't very good at converting the Composite Analog signal to Digital.

I have a Laser Disc player hooked to a 50" Panasonic Plasma and it doesn't look very good either, passable at an 8 foot viewing distance but up close there's a lot of noise.

When the LDP was hooked to a Sony LCD Projector however it looked very good.

Some sets may just have very good A/D converters and some don't.

I found that if I copied the Laser Disc to DVD using a DVD Recorder and then played the DVD on the Plasma it looks very good..

I think the simple answer to your question is that CRT televisions have better picture quality than non-CRT televisions.

You're absolutely correct when you say that flat panels are trash.

The simple answer is that any set works best when it's fed the signal it was designed for.

Or you may now be viewing at a higher resolution than the source. While conversion quality will come into play, you now have a display that is capable of showing what's "wrong" with the signal.

Another example is standard def satellite, like DirecTV. Looked very good on CRT TV's, even very good TVs. But connect the same signal to a high resolution display, and all the compression artifacts were easy to see. Go back to CRT, and it still looked good... although now the viewer was educated in what to look for, and there was indeed evidence to see.

You could audition some higher-quality A-D converters, but only you can decide if it's worth the expense. Line doubling, dropout compensation and chroma noise reduction can help, (like on a Panasonic 7750 deck) because it gives the converter a signal with fewer problems to accommodate. Your projector may have line-doubling, too.

Chip

I agree completly!!!

Couldnt have said this better :)

I refer to the pictures on the flat panel TV's as being "muddy", when using regular cable, as the signal source.
Using an OTA digital signal, the picture is somewhat "watch-able", at best.
The sound on most of these sets is pathetic. :sigh:

I know what he is talking about with the tapes on the flat tv , kind of looks like you put wax paper over the screen ... i use a 1080i sony 36" 4.3 crt tv and enjoy both hd and non hd like vhs , yes you can see the vhs looks no where as good as other things like dvd but it doesn't have the wax paper look , some more expensive flat sets do a better job and it doesn't look like wax paper but still looks bad , as far as vhs unless its something that i can't get in any other format ( has not been released ) or was made on a camcorder other then those reasons the garbage man has been breaking his back with tapes and goodwill has been making out with pre-recorded vhs tapes i donated.... oh yeah a side note the old vhs tapes recorded off analog signals from 20 and more years ago look better sometimes then the standard definition digital cable is offering , makes me miss analog , yeah hd looks better but regular 480 digital vs analog i prefered the analog 480

mike

SD delivery via cable is allotted just enough bandwidth to provide an identifiable signal. (HD via cable isn't full-bandwidth, either, on most systems.) Gotta save room for all the shopping channels and pay-per-view stuff, because that's what actually makes money for the cable company (apparently).

"Decent" analog sources (signal generators, 1" tape, BetaSP) look OK on some LCD monitors, but there's "least-cost conversion" going on, without a doubt.

SD digital formats, like D2, look pretty good on a low-res CRT, but not so good on a HD monitor, even when monitored digitally with no conversion.
It was engineered for its intended display.

I saw early analog HD at an NAB convention many years ago -- made by Sony on modified 1" machines, and displayed on modified CRT monitors and projectors. Looked quite good, with no digital 'banding', great resolution (of course) and the kicker -- a "2 hour" 1" reel (18 or 20 inches in diameter) would hold 20 to 30 minutes of program. The machines were dishwasher size, plus a similar-size cabinet of extra electronics. Even the guys at Sony weren't thinking analog HD would catch on. "It'll be smaller when it's digital" they said.

Chip

Myself and a couple of friends were just talking about this today. Conclusion: LCD, Plasma, are very unforgiving when VHS or similar are being played through them. Why? We don't know!

Probably because HD has someting like 2,000,000 pixels of picture information while VHS has about 160,000.

Kind of like trying to make 1 pound of Hamburger feed 20 people, there's going to be a lot of filler.

Amen Eric.

Quality is better than quantity.

In this case quantity is directly related to picture quality. What's quality about watching an inferior format?
Would you go to the theater if they only used 16mm projectors?

I watched a Laser Disc movie on my 92-inch digital LCD projector screen last night. It looked quite good (except that the movie's transfer to video itself was poor). As Eric said, the big variable in NTSC/analog/standard-definition performance on HD displays is the quality of the conversion circuitry. Laser Disc players themselves varied widely in video-output quality; the one I used is a later but not high-end model Pioneer CLD-D504. VHS is another matter, though. No matter how much you spend on your lipstick (the LCD display), you're still putting it on a pig.