Vertical resolution is therefore sacrificed. The reason more expensive, high-end scan converters can eliminate more flicker with less loss of resolution is because, among other reasons, they are able to selectively apply flicker reduction only to those portions of an image where the effect will be beneficial. These low-end models eliminate flicker by completely discarding every other line of the image, and displaying two successive passes of the remaining lines. Because the interlaced lines are now identical, no flicker is visible. Obviously, this method of removing flicker has serious drawbacks, as half the visual information from your original image has been lost.
Small text becomes unreadable.
Thin, horizontal lines may disappear. Plus, this method of flicker reduction compromises the actual NTSC standard the very signal the scan converter was designed to create. So, don t be too quick to judge the quality of a scan converter based simply on the amount of flicker in its output. When displaying a computer image on a TV monitor, the scan converter's level of performance is the only element affecting the quality of the converted image. While images generated by scan converters won t look exactly the same as the original computer image, there are many things you can do to get the best picture possible.