Artifacts in SD programming on OTA

No... perhaps due more to the poor quality of the original programming, upconversion by the x-mission source and possibly the additional upconversion performed by the TV.

If it was primary channel (x.1) = good, vs subchannel (x.2) = bad, then you could blame the deinterlacer/scaler in the TV; a common complaint with newer TVs.

Otherwise - see above.

Your local station might not have enough HD storage also and have to downconvert, then upconvert like mine did with "Oprah" when they time-shifted it.

I agree with Ratman about the problem likely being the poor quality of the original material or a problem in the up-conversion by the television. One thing I noticed is that some TVs just do a better job handling content then other TVs. I have a cheap $150 LCD and everything looks terrible on it while on other TVs the same video looks great.

A major part of it the sub channels that the main station has, in my NYC neck of the woods the worst sub channel I've seen is ThisTV.. it like watching a very low quality VCD, viewed thru saran wrap eyeglases!

Same here! And forget the fast-action scenes - blursville. They show some good movies but hardly worth the time due to the poor quality. Here the station was decent when it was an ABC affiliate sub but went to crap when it became a CW affiliate sub (both "the only network-affiliate stations in the market not to be owned and operated by any major network.").

I can under stand when viewing OTA, but i wish cable companies would get these substations other than grabbing them from OTA itself so it could be a nice cleab signal.

If anything the cable companies would want to compress the signal even more, to leave more room for more channels, internet, etc. OTA is generally as good as it gets for most people although I've read that if you have one of those 10' satellite dishes you might be able to snag a non encrypted network feed which would trump even OTA.

I finally came across a broadcast where the 16:9 zoom makes sense (unless of course you like your images stretched vertically I've known a few people that like it that way). One of those small stations showing a somewhat old color movie that was compressed vertically, looked perfect using the 16:9 zoom (excuse my terminology, I guess it's actually a 16:9 format or somesuch). I can't believe it took me this long to experience this as I figured there must be a good reason for it.

I use zoom quite frequently when watching most of my local PBS channel's SD subs. They are broadcast 4:3 with letterbox top and bottom(IOW postage stamp). Zoom fills my screen at proper aspect although does degrade the picture a little because of magnifying the small postage stamp. Zooming also has the nice added side effect of getting rid of most of the PBS bug

Yeah I've seen that a coupla times, I think it was commercials so I didn't care. So small it cut the viewing area about half. I'll have to check out my local PBS more often to see if they do it too.

It probably makes most sense for PBS since the source is 16:9, if they broadcast it in full screen 4:3 they'd either have to crop the sides or do as they do, which is letter box the 4:3.