I have a Samsung DLP LED HLT 5087S and standard definition looks awful. It is very grainy and pixelation encompasses all blacks. Will calibration help fix this or does the t.v just suck?

First, the source sucks.

Second, yes absolutely a calibration is very helpful.

Third, at the very least to a basic calibration. Especially if it's just out of the box settings, sharpness is often turned very high. This greatly exaggerates the sharp edges of the crappy compressed macroblocks and makes the poor quality SD content (we're talking broadcast, cable etc here) really stand out. With a proper image without all the exaggerated sharpness controls cranked way up and color blasted out, SD looks far more respectable, due to reduced noise.

So the source sucks? Do you think I should spend the extra dollars on a calibration or just buy a new television set and sell the one I got.

If you like your TV and you don't notice the rainbow effect and you're satisfied with the light output then I'd do the calibration and start to view more HD sources. :D

So the source sucks? Do you think I should spend the extra dollars on a calibration or just buy a new television set and sell the one I got.

If the source sucks with this TV, and you get a new TV, your source is still going to suck with the new TV.

Standard def on big screens sucks, especially if it is from cable or satellite. There may be settings in your TV that will help (mostly noise reduction modes) make SD sources look better. If you have all of those turned off, you aren't getting the benefit of using them.

There are also issues with the cable box or satellite box... many of them will output only 1 resolution - you set that choice and everything that comes out of the box is the same resolution. The boxes don't do a very good job of converting standard def to 1080. If your box has a "Through" mode or "Native" mode that passes standard def programming in 480 and HD programming in 720 or 1080, you may get a better picture using that setting.

There are a lot of issues. Most calibrators will either know or be able to figure out pretty quickly whethe all the "extra" settings in the User Menu are being used/set correctly to get good SD image quality. You give no indication at all about whether you understand the use of all the "extra" settings or what settings exist for your display, so it's a crap-shoot whether there's anything significant that would improve SD image quality.

Blowing up standard def to fit a 50" or 60" screen reveals ALL the problems, it's like looking at an old TV screen with a magnifying glass. Put a magnifying glass up to an older standard def TV that looks fine displaying SD programming and you immediately see how bad those images are. But you sit so far away from those old screens, you can't see the problems. Cable and satellite compress the crap out of every channel... HD is distinctly low res compared to high-def discs, and SD is filled with compression artifacs and noise. Making the image huge, makes the problems in the image huge. If you want standard def to look good, get a 36" diagonal CRT and use it to enjoy standard def. You can only make SD look good up to a point on a large panel or RPTV - to make it better, you could move farther from the screen... like 12 or 15 feeet from a 60" display that you would sit 8-9 feet from for HD viewing. The added distance makes the defects in the images difficult or impossible to see.

A basic calibration costs you 30bucks for a disc and a little bit of your time. That's a no-brainer.

Thanks guys for all of your responses :-)