I can only give you my personal observations. I have had my HDTV and tuner for about 10 months now. I have a Mits WS-65087 w/ both a Mits SR-HD5 tuner and an RCA DTC100 tuner. Despite observations by others of lower resolution image on non-HD stations, I find my Directv non-HD stations to be of exellent resolution when watching in the normal mode (gray sidebars) with a few exceptions. Directv compresses digitally its signal and some channels are more compressed than others. On the more compressed channels, the image suffers but this was the case on my 27" Sony also. The major channels like CNN, Foxnews, MSNBC and most of the movie stations look great. One problem using normal mode is the gray sidebars may possibly cause screen burn-in. I've been watching like this for 10 months and have had no problem. But I watch a lot of HD programming as opposed to SD (probably 50/50). I hope this helps.