Your observation actually illustrates the problem with attempting to evaluate various television displays.

First, your cable company may have taken an original analog or digital broadcast signal and performed a low level MPEG compression to limit bandwidth in order to redistribute to subscribers.

Second, your television decompresses this and tries to reinterpret the signal to display in it's own native scan format.

Third, this can all look pretty bad!

The biggest problem is all the various compression and format conversions that take place, as well as the television's actual ability to provide a high quality picture, can create a situation where the video quality can suffer beyond belief.

Probably the best, and most readily available, signal source to judge the overall video quality of a television display is an OTA (over the air) terrestrial television signal.

i got this set about 3yrs ago. my kid used it in her bedroom and complained about the picture from day 1. my pc lcd monitor died this weekend. burnt out backlight? kid is at college now so this old analog monitor is not even used. was not sure it even had pc input.

i watch a few local stations for news mostly. i like sports and home improvement shows and car shows so i have to pay for programming like espn, hgtv, spike, speed channels. i want more than local programming so i choose to pay for cable.

Oops, small correction - was doing to many things at once.

In the above reply I meant to say - second, your STB (set top box) decompresses the signal

Your television then takes the analog signal from the STB and processes it for display.

This of course assumes you are on a digital cable system. However, some LCD TVs, especially off brand, can look bad no matter what as they use less sophisticated designs.