What are the tricks to hooking up an LCD TV to a cable box and a DVD player?

Question

I just bought an LG 42LG30, hooked it up with an HDMI cable to my cable box and it looks terrible. I've tried to adjust the pixels and the sharpness, but it looks just like my old analog TV. It seems like a total waste of money and I'm wondering what the catch is to hooking it up? Do I have to order HD cable? Do I have to upgrade my DVD player (I just bought it last July). Help!

Answer 1

First-you need an HD source!

SD on an HDTV dies not look as good as on an analog set of comparable size. To get the kind of pictures you see in the stores, you need to feed in an HD source.

If your TV has a QAM tuner, hook-up the cable directly to the TV. You will receive any unscrambled digital TV your cable has on it. This frequently is the locally available over the air DTV, including HDTV.

Next, get HD cable or satellite service for additional channels.

Your DVDs should look pretty good, even if you don't have an up-converting player. If you recently bought it, then it should work well-you porobably don't have your settings correct.

Update

I use a cheap, old, non-upconverting DVD player, and my DVDs look near-HD in quality. And I know that my experience is normal. So, if that isn't yours, something is wrong.

Answer 2

to clarify, the menus on our DVD player and our cable guide look all pixelated. we're going to contact our cable provider to get an HD-ready cable box (our current one is really old), but I'm not sure why the DVD menus (and consequently anything on the DVD player) looks all pixelated, even when we use an HDMI cable to connect the DVD player to the TV.