Is the difference between 480i (and 576i) and 1080i/p REALLY that noticable?

Question

My step dad has a full hd set up (sony 42" and a 9.1 Harmon Kardon stereo for all of you junkies) and for the most part i find it more visually enjoyable watching my tv in my bedroom through a regular satellite and an old 32" tube tv.

Whether it's just me or not, when i watch "hd" tv when ever colours become solid i see alot of degradation. For example whenever black is displayed i often catch a very very very dark green pixelation as if you're watching videos on youtube, where as i've never seen this on my old tv.

In case your thinking that it's the connections that aren't very good he uses monster cables which are top of the line. All of his connections are digital; there are no analog conversions. And lastly whenever i turn on the tv it says the conection type and quality and it says: HDMI: 1080i

Thanks for any answers, and thanks to anyone who can help me fix the picture quality even though that's really not the task at hand.

Answer 1

To answer your first question, 480i is standard definition.  1080p is the highest of the high definitions.  So, yes, there is a noticeable difference.

Unfortunately, the downside of HDTV is that it will be unforgiving to an overly compressed signal, and, unfortunately, there have been complaints that cable companies are doing just that, to cram as much content as they can into a limited amount of bandwidth.  My guess is, that's what you're seeing.  Youtube videos are very heavily compressed, so of course they aren't going to look good on an HDTV.  If you watch a blue-ray dvd (or even an anamorphic widescreen dvd) on your HDTV, it should look far better than anything you would see on a standard def television.

Edit: Right.  Well, I've seen the pixelation you're talking about also on HDTV's, and basically, that's tradeoff of a high-def TV - low quality signals will look bad on it, but the high-quality stuff will look great.

Answer 2

Is the HDTV hooked up to an antenna?  If so, it appears you may have a weak signal.  That can cause green pixelation.  There should be no comparison between picture quality of a true 1080 i/p HDTV and analog (480i) TV.