Can someone please help me with the settings on my equipment so I can maximize my Hi-Def experience. I have a 58" Sony 1080i/720p 16:9 Rear Projection HDTV. I have a Sony progressive DVD player (I don't think it is upconverting). And I get my HDTV from Comcast through a Motorolla Cable Box. Now my TV lets me set the picture to "Interlaced", "Progressive", or "Cinemscan 3:2 Pulldown". I understand the first two, but what is Cinemascan 3:2 Pulldown? Would I use that just for movies and switch back to one of the others for regular HDTV?

I would have to guess that CinemaScan 3:2 pulldown mode would take an interlaced signal and use an internal process to convert to a progressive image.

The difference between that and "progressive mode" would be in progressive mode, you feed the set a progressive picture to begin with.

I'm assuming it lets you choose between the de-interlacing on the player vs. the de-interlacing on the TV.

I'm an idiot. I misread the feature. It's actually called CineMotion. The descriptions reads:

"Provides an optimized display by automatically detecting film content and applying a reverse 3-2 pulldown process. moving pictures will appear clearer and more natural-looking."

Anyone care to translate that into English for me? Thanks.

That's a description of a de-interlacer, so what I said before is correct.

Thanks for the clarification. So is it safe to say that since my DVD player is progressive scan, I don't need de-interlacing and thus I don't need to set my TV to this mode? Or is there some other benefit to using this setting? Would it have any impact to my HDTV cable signal?

That's probably true on the DVD player unless the TV has a better de-interlacer. You can experiment and see. I would guess you probably wouldn't see a big difference between the DVD progressive scan and the TV one. It depends on which one has the best de-interlacer (you can read a lot about chipsets and progressive scan DVD players here).

It may do de-interlacing on your cable signal... assuming they're not already de-interlaced by the cable box coming in. I assume you can set the output of the cable box so you will know what it is outputting.