New TV This game looks even better
 

well my Toshiba 52" LCD died after only 5 months and stuff in 480p looked ok on it. So Toshiba sent me a check for what i paid for the TV and let me tell u i got the Vizio 55 inch that just came out and holy crap 480p look so F#cking good, the game look so much better. also for anyone that has a HD tv i learned that if u watch anything in standerd non hd stuff they say to turn up the Sharpness to the highest. it will make everything look so much better and i cant tell u enough how great NFL 2k9 looks these days wow so happy it really feels like a new game.

Re: New TV This game looks even better
 

Wow i didnt know that, when we first got our 55' plasma SD looked horrible! Thanks for that tip!

Re: New TV This game looks even better
 

Actually, regarding the sharpness, it should be turned down, not up.

Taken from Crutchfield

"Sharpness: Sharpness could more accurately be called "artificial edge enhancement," and generally only improves the look of lower-quality signals like standard broadcast, cable, and satellite programs. Increasing the sharpness is like turning up the treble control on your receiver; you may think you're getting more detail, but the result is definitely not more accurate. Having Sharpness set too high often creates halos around the edges of objects onscreen. Many DVD movies already have edge-enhancement added during mastering, so you can generally turn Sharpness nearly to zero for your DVD input. Sharpness is also not needed for most HDTV sources."

Its going to give you the appearance that your SD signals look better, being as its just artificially enhancing the picture. However, its going to totally jack up anything you broadcast in HD and your DVD (since they already have edge enhancement done when they're mastered).

Also, different TVs display differently. Some TVs have better scalers then others and can handle SD signals better. I have a 32" Panasonic LCD and it does a great job with SD (and my sharpness is at its lowest setting). The better quality scaler a TV has, the better its able to display

Another thing that is important is calibrating your TV. A lot of people have no idea about this and just set their TV up and go. The default settings are always out of whack. Companies setup them to high and you're not getting a true color representation. There's a couple of ways to do this

A) Buy a HDTV Calibration Disc. These range from $25-$50 and run you through a series of tests to setup your TV properly.

B) Use the THX Optimizer. Its available on certain DVDs (all the Star Wars for example) and does a good job of calibrating your TV.

I used the THX Optimizer that came on my Star Wars DVDs and it did a good job of setting my TV up.

My HD games and movies look great, as do my SD stuff, especially my Wii (which usually looks like crap on HDTVs). I have my sharpness turned all the way down.

A couple of questions, what are you playing the game on, a Xbox or a 360. If its a 360, are you using HDMI or Component. If you're using HDMI, the 360 upscales Xbox games into whatever resolution you're playing the game at (1080i, 720p, 1080p). The 360, unlike the PS3, has a hardware scaler built into it (which means that 720p games can only be shown at 720p or 480p on the PS3, it can't upscale them to 1080p, meaning games have to be programmed to support each resolution), which means it can upscale content to a higher resolution (in this case, Xbox games being 480p into 720p or 1080i (p).