I have a 55 inch flat panel RCA 1080i HD Television. I had HD cable at my home and the picture was amazing. Now I'm in college, and there is no HD televsion here. The picture quality on the TV is a low 480i. The picture looks stretched out and is very blurry. I have tried switching the view from widescreen to standard to movie etc....this doesnt work. Is there any trick to get this picture to at least look like a normal non HD picture?
Not much you can do, that has always been the case with HDTV's. If you want your TV might have a "100%" viewing mode where it doesn't stretch the image to fit the screen.
I'm confused but you have the HD on you? Or is it at home? HD might not display 480 pixels. My TV, I can only watch the HD channels otherwise it looks funny and blocky. I'm sure there might be settings or not.
Theres almost literally no way around this... as far as i know at least. Its unfotunate, but the ony way to take advantage of having a high definition tv is if you have the right amount of information (aka 720p/1080i or 1080p) being sent to it. Any less and it'l blow it up to fit the screen and it'll look like shit. Its funny since the better tv simply makes the shitty quality more noticeable hahah its kinda ironic.
for an example of why you cant do it. take a realy small picture on your computer 250x250 or so and stretch it out accross the whole monitor, that is what our tv is trying to do with the picture, honestly whith my 42inch the picture quality from the anntenna was WAY better than the commcast basic cable