Mods if you want to move this to the tweaks section go ahead or redirect to the appropriate area...

Anyways, I just received my Sony SXRD 55" 1080p television yesterday... It has a build date of 01/07 and I am using Charter cable for the time being... I also have the Motorola dct 3416 HD DVR....

How would I go about maximizing the sd content on this television? I have a sd tv upstairs and it appears to me that the sd on the hdtv is distorted, grainy, and sort of blurry.

Thanks in advance

^

SD cable looks mediocre on all HDTVs. You can optimize PQ using a calibration DVD, but you're still blowing up a poor signal onto a large screen that shows every fault. I'm not sure what you mean by "distorted"? Are you stetching it to 16:9 (IMO, you're better off watching 4:3 material as 4:3 with black bars on the sides).

Get your black, white and color settings where you want them. Then turn off all the enhancement stuff, except for maybe low noise reduction if it's analog cable. Then put the DRC to 0,0 and start playing with it from there to get the balance of grain and blur you want.

It's crappy cable SD blown up to 55", so there's only so much you can do.

Yes, the trick I found is to shut off a lot of the processing then play with DRC until it looks decent.