Hey everyone. I searched for this issue but didn't see anything quite the same as what I'm experiencing. So here comes my first post here! :)

I just upgraded my old Mitsubishi 42" RP HDTV to a new Samsung 56" DLP HL56A650C1 over the weekend.

I've noticed that during motion, black horizontal lines appear in places on light colors. For example, sometimes when someone is talking, it looks like there are black horizontal lines going across their white teeth. It looks sort of like the image is tearing. I also sometimes notice the image "ghosting"...that is to say that if someone is moving around, it sometimes looks like there's a ghost image behind the movement. It seems to only crop up in movies on TV and not regular broadcast TV like the news and such.

I've played around with some of the menu settings thinking that it might just be some auto setting that doesn't work great doing it. But if that's the case, I haven't had any luck finding the bad setting.

My setup is as follows:

Cable > Tivo HD > TV (via HDMI cable)

I do not have HD service yet so my picture is 480i. This happens while watching live TV and a recorded program on my Tivo. I have not noticed it in playing DVDs (HTiaB unit connected via HDMI) or video games (Wii connected via component video) but since the TV is so new, I haven't had a chance to really watch it much.

Is this just because I'm watching a standard def program on the TV? Is my HDMI cable crappy? Do I have a bum TV that needs replacing? I didn't notice this happening in the store which was showing an HD signal.

The cable company is coming out tomorrow to set up the HD service and cable cards so I'll be able to tell if this is doing it due to the 480i signal.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

You are correct in assuming that the problem is associated with not having HD service for your HDTV TV has to upscale SD 480i TV programs to 1080p. The upscaling is less noticable on DVDs and on Movies broadcast over TV since the two interlaced 480i fields are taken from the same movie frame and no motion compensation is required when de-interlacing the inputs. Your Mitsubishi was most likely a CRT based RPTV that could scan at 480i so no upscaling was required for SD inputs.
Your new TV does have a built in OTA ATSC tuner so without having to get HD service you can receive the HD broadcasts of your local TV stations with a simple antenna depending on the location of the stations transmission towers.

Thanks a bunch, Walford! After posting this last night I had a chance to play some Wii for a little bit and the picture looked great.

If the Time Warner HD signal still looks lousy, I'll run out and pick up an antenna and try the OTA signal.

The digital tuner in your TV may also be capable of receiving the unencrypted HD QAM channels from your TW cable service which are a subset of the channels you will get with an antenna. So try connecting your cable service directly to the digital tuner connection on your TV with a splitter or instead of connecting it to your Tivo.

The cable installer has come and set up my cable card and HD for me. The HD channels look beautiful and perfect.

I was looking at the Tivo Community forums to see if there's been similar disccusion there and found some interesting reading about the video output formats that the Tivo HD can use. I've changed the output to a fixed 1080i, which forces everything from the Tivo to display in that resolution rather than doing some hybrid conversions and the SD channels look much better now.

Hooray for glorious high definition! Thanks, Walford!