A friend of mine feels the need to upgrade his CTR TV and asked for some advice. Now he has a huge library of old TV programmes which are in SD format (or worse), and will still want to watch them.

I still watch some SD stuff and when I got my Panasonic about four years ago I looked at lots of reviews of different models to see how they preformed with SD. But checking on reviews these days they don't seem to mention SD performance.

I've given him the idea that Sony and the more expensive type of Panasonic will be better at upscaling SD. Though I don't really know how good all the other makes are these days. Any suggestions??

As you say, generally the better sets have better scalers, so tend to perform better on SD - and Sony have always had some of the best scalers around.

Cheap sets tend to have cheap scalers, and perform poorly - presumably good scaling is expensive, and it seems to be one of the biggest differences between cheap and expensive sets.

What's the 'source' he's using for this SD material?

If it's a VCR then frankly the quality's going to be appalling however good the set is.

Quite true, VCR's are appallingly poor

Well they are from a variety of sources, some recorded onto a pvr and transferred to DVD, others which started out on VHS tapes from years ago, others bought as DVD box-sets - though nearly all of them are in some form of 4:3 standard definition. He has thousands of episodes of stuff, most of which I think of as crap, but which he still likes to watch occasionally.

He isn't expecting it to be magically transformed into crisp 1080p, he just wants it to be not too much worse that on his 2001 Hitachi 28" widescreen TV.

I advised him that a 40" set was probably the biggest he should go for, he usually sits about 12-15 feet from the screen. I'll ask him to tell me what models he is looking at and do my best to check they are okay-ish. I had a glance at some TVs yesterday and even the better ones seem to be cheaper now than when I bought my Panasonic 32" a few years ago, I bought it at £650 but get a hundred back from John Lewis under their price-check thing when they cut the price a couple of weeks later.

I watch a lot of SD stuff as well (like old episodes of TOTP) and I find 40" is too big personally. and 32" is about as big as you should go. I've always been happy with Samsung for picture quality.

No matter what the set, it's going to be considerably poorer than his old CRT set on VHS sourced material, as they blur the lines together- helping to hide how poor it is.

I watch some SD Channels and DVDs from just over 10ft on a 40 inch Sony and most material looks fine although needless to say nothing like as good as HD. However, you will notice that some poor bit rate channels look a bit soft, as do some poorly mastered DVDs, and you may also see digital artefacts on them. You can watch most commercial VHSs and ones made from a good stable source such as a Freeview box but they look rather poor. Recordings originally made from noisy analogue channels, together with long play recordings and dubbed tapes, especially if cheap tape has been used, will look very poor. I would also advise him to accept 4X3 pictures in their original format and not try to stretch them in any way to fill the scree as this will just magnify the faults.

I had a drink with my TV-buying chum last night and it seems he took a DVD player and some sample DVDs into Currys earlier this week to ask them if they'd connect it up to some of the sets he was interested in. That was something I'd suggested but I didn't know if shops would actually do it. Though according to him they seemed happy to do it.

Anyway the TV which came out best on that standard definition test was a Sony, so I think he'll be buying that one -

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/tv-and-...26467-pdt.html

Maybe something to do with the new X1 processor chip?

There were many sets which he ruled out instantly because they didn't have scart sockets. Of course you can get blu-ray/dvd players with HDMI nowadays but he likes to buy one thing at a time.

As I said earlier, Sony scalers are one of the best.


Mainly Samsung that have dropped SCART (so far).