I have Cablevision iO Digital cable, and I just went to the local store to trade in my SD cable box for the HD cable box.

Fortunately it will still work normally with my SD 27" tube TV.

However I also have the cable box hooked up to my projector for HD content. So far I am not impresed.
The front panel display says 1080i on it. And my projector's menu screen agrees -- it is seeing a 1080i signal. But I cannot figure out how to change the output resolution of the cable box to 720p to match the native resolution of my projector.

In the cable box settings menu, there is a view option to select "normal, pass-through, upconvert1, and upconvert2." However none of the settings seems to make any difference, and the box is still outputting a 1080i signal through the component jacks (it does have an HDMI output, but I don't have an HDMI switcher -- and I am using my HDMI connection for my DVD player).

Not surprisingly, the SD content looked like crap on the big screen -- possibly even worse than the SD cable box via sVideo. If it is possible to let the box output the native resolution, I would like to try letting the projector's internal scaler handle the scaling of the image.

When I found the HD channels, I was also not impressed. Static images had beautiful detail. But any motion resulted in deinterlacing artifacts -- jaggies, and "combing" (if that term is even still used with digital displays.) I suspect the artifacts are a result of the projector scaling the image from 1080i to 720p. However when I let my Oppo 970 send a 1080i image to the projector, the projector scales it much more cleanly.

FWIW, the box is a Scientific Atlanta 7250.

I'll continue to play with this thing. But if anybody has any suggestions on how to improve the video performance, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks!
-- Peter

"Why are all of my programs displayed in 1080i format?
You may have selected the Easy Setup mode and the Widescreen (16:9) TV setting in the HDTV Setup Wizard. Choosing these two settings together limits your programming to 1080i format, even on non-HD channels. To see your non-HD programs in 480i on a widescreen HDTV, used the Advanced Setup in the HDTV Setup Wizard. Make sure you select 480i as one of your saved formats, and then select Pass-Through in General Settings: Picture Format for your default picture format."

Btw, which NHTs do you have?

Yuo need to access this wizard to unlock the other available resolutions. On my box, you leave your TV on and turn the cable box off. Then press "GUIDE" and "INFO" at the same time. The wizard comes up and you follow the instructions on the screen to add resolutions. I just truned all of them on so I have the option to change it when I need to from the standard menu. Then after you complete the wizard, you go back and set the picture format to fixed and 720p if you want it to output 720p all the time. I set mine to pass-though so it will always output the native signal and my TV does the conversion. I found that for my particular setup, the provides the most conveinience and best picture.

Good ol' Cablevision. They gave me an installation guide, which I don't need. But not an owners manual for the box which would have told me how to access the HD setup wizard. I suppose if I went to SciAtl's website, I might have found it. But I thank you for instructing me on how to do it. I took your suggestion and activated all the available output resolutions. And I'll play around with them to see which looks best with my projector.

-- Peter

Actually my mains are not NHT at all. They are a one-off speaker by an independent company in the midwest called Patterson Audio. A friend of mine bought them years ago directly from Ralph Patterson. Basically Patterson builds the cabinets (beautiful woodworking), and installs off-the-shelf components. I don't know who makes the woofer, but the tweeter is the same one that ProAc used in their Response3.

They speakers have a flat response down to 65Hz, and usable bass down to 50Hz. They finally trail off around 40Hz. My Velodyne sub is crossed over at 60Hz.

Selecting matching center & surround speakers was a bit of a challenge. Several years ago I brought ONE of my speakers to an audio salon, and the salesman was very helpful. He let me demo every center speaker in the store --- using test tones and music -- until we found one that was sonically similar to my Patterson speaker.
The one that worked the best was the NHT SuperAudio2 center speaker. And I got a pair of SuperOne speakers for the rears.

If I could find a single white NHT SuperZero, I may get it as my 6th channel (my receiver will do 6.1). But I don't think my wife wants any more speakers hanging in our living room.

I know that is more information than you wanted to know. But there you go.

Thanks for the heads up on the simple vs. advanced setup menu. HIS4 gave me the instructions on how to access the setup menu, and your suggestion to select "advanced" was very helpful as well.

Cheers,
Peter

Thanks again for instructing me on how to setup the cable box. I took your suggestion and set the output to "pass through." So when I was flipping channels I got a mix of 720p and 1080i signals so I could see which looked better on my projector.

Now that the projector is doing the scaling, instead of the cable box the motion artifacts are all gone.

I will say that 1080i seems to give a nicer static image. But since my projector's resolution is 720p, channels broadcasting at that resolution tend to have cleaner motion.

I really got to check it out last night while watching the president's SoTU address -- particularly the camera pans early in the broadcast when the cabinet and president were entering the room. CBS and NBC were broadcasting 1080i which looked good. (CBS seemed to be just a little cleaner.)
Fox was upscaling a SD signal and broadcasting that on their HD channel, which looked absolutely horrible on a 96" screen. ABC was broadcasting 720p. As I mentioned above, the 1080i broadcasts had somewhat cleaner static images. But the 720p broadcast looked the best with motion.

Incidentally I was so busy looking at the picture and comparing the different channels and resolutions that I didn't listen to the president's speech. Did he say anything interesting?

Cheers,
Peter