What Presides over HD Stretch, Zoom, and Normal Settings? TV or Cable Box?

[Jack 1000]

Hey All,

We will soon be purchasing an HD-TV and have a question about picture preference settings.  With regards to Normal, Zoom, Stretch, Aspect Ratio, what settings preside over what you see?  Is it the TV settings or the Cable Box?  I have an TWC SA-8300HD Mystro Navigator DVR?

If there is a settings conflict, does the TV or cable box decide what settings to use?  Or do they work together?

Jack

[jkane]

None of the above!  They work independently!  So if you zoom on both, you get double zoom.  If you letter box on both, you could end up with double letter box.

There is some automatic detection on some TV's, but don't count on it.

[TPK]

Ya the TV is usually dumb when it comes to figuring out what to do on its own... Generally the easiest thing to do is to use the settings in the cable box to determine how to handle the diferent formats...  At the very least, you have to tell your cable box what video modes your TV is capable of supporting (480i or maybe 480p for SD televisions, 1080i and 720p for HD televisions)...  IF you tell the cable box to output 1080i to a SD television that cannot handle it, then you will get a garbage picture or a smarter TV will just go to a blue screen or something and tell you that the video mode is not supported..

It never ceases to amaze me whenver I see a HDTV in someone's home and the cable box is either not hooked up with the right cabling (either HDMI or component cabling is needed for HD), or does not have its settings set to output HD...  So basically they would have this wonderful 50-inch plasma HDTV and they would only ever be watching SD on it...  So, when you do get your HDTV and hook it up, please do not neglect to go into the settings menu and set up your video modes to 1080i and 720p...

IT seems to me, however, that you would get the best quality on a HDTV by setting the SD picture to "stretch", and then have the TV squish it down by setting its aspect ratio...  I think this way the TV is getting more picture "information" as a stretched picture, and then the TV shrinks it down, retaining that information but just pushing it to a smaller space...  Whereas if the cable box is doing the aspect ratio, then the TV is being presented with an already-squished picture with fewer pixels or information, and its just going to display the picture as-is with pillar-boxes provided to it by the cable box...  Therefore I think setting the cable box to stretch, and then the TV to a 4:3 apsect ratio (your remote may have an "aspect" button right on it) would be the best quality-wise, but may require some work (i.e. pushing that aspect button when switching from SD to HD content) on the part of the person changing the channels..

My particular TV (I have a samsung DLP projection) seems to "remember" the settings based on the video mode and port used..  So if its a SD (480i) signal coming from the Component-1 port, and I set the picture stretched on the TV, then the TV will remember that a 480i signal on Component-1 will stretch...   Same is true for any other video mode on any other port...

At least that is what my TV does... I  imagine most HDTVs will do the same...

I used to have TWC cable, and the cable box was able to bet set to output multiple resolutions (either 480i, 720p, or 1080i depending on the broadcast), so my TV was able to utilize different settings based on wheather the picture was SD or HD, which I liked..  The downside to this was I would have to wait for a little bit for my TV to "adjust" to the new video mode whenever I would switch from one channel to another that would use a different mode...   If I had my box set to output just a single resolution, then I would not have to wait for the picture to adjust...

In other words, back when I had TWC, I would tell my cable box to "stretch" SD content, and then I told my TV to "squish" the picture using the aspect button, and the nice thing is that my TV would "remember" those settings for SD because the TV was receiving SD via a 480i video mode, whereas HD was coming in at 1080i or 720p...  This meant I could switch from HD to SD, get the best (possible) quality on SD, and not have to switch the aspect setting on my TV whenever I did that because the TV would "remmeber" that for 480i content its supposed to squish the picture...

When I switched to U-verse, I was disappointed to discover that the box is only capable of being set to one output resolution...  So now I was no longer able to tell the box to output based on the broadcast, but it could only output to what I set it to (in my case, I chose 720p because my TV only has 720 resolution)...  

Additionally, I cannot even tell my U-verse box to "Stretch" a SD picture...  Once I set my box to 720p it will automatically pillar-box the picture for SD content (there is no setting for that), and if I want it stretched to fill the screen I would have to stretch the picture on my TV (which is the opposite of what I would want to do), and of course I would have to then tell my TV to un-stretch the picture when I would get back to HD content..  Remember, my TV at this point cannot tell if its a SD or a HD picture because with this box the video mode remains the same (720p) no matter what channel I am tuned to...

Thankfully this doesnt really matter all that much to me because I barely watch anything in SD anymore anyhow, and u-verse has enough HD channels now that I would never want to go back, but still it would have been nice if these boxes would have a little more flexibility in them by having more options, like the TWC boxes have...

Anyhow, I hope this helps...

[Jack 1000]

Thanks all for your great comments!  Great help!

Jack