I have a Samsung 23" 2333 monitor connected for my laptop. It has 1900*1200 resolution. Everything looks great and so are the DVD movies. However when it comes to watching my cable TV in the Vista Media Center, the picture quality is very poor relatively. I mean it is low contrast, not so great brightness and there is no sharpness at all in images. Kind of very similar to youtube videos when you watch them full screen. The GYM that I go to has a small old CRT TV with the signal from the same provider but the picture quality is more real to what you call a TV. I know it is not the monitor as everything else is great with it and I also know nothing wrong from the provider as well. I strongly suspect the poor quality of the video is because of my TV tuner being Analog but I need your help on this. Could Analog tuner produce a picture so poor than a picure being produced by an old CRT TV?

An analog tuner will only give you a display of 640x480 or less. Also the picture is probably being further degraded by converting the HD picture to low resolution.

"I strongly suspect the poor quality of the video is because of my TV tuner being Analog" Bingo! Analog cable TV will always look like crap on a high-resolution display, no matter how strong the signal is. DVD is considered to be the "bare minimum" for use on such displays. If you really want a good picture, you're gonna need a high definition source, like an HDTV tuner or Blu-Ray drive. However, I wouldn't recommend getting a PC HDTV tuner. Because cable/satellite providers don't trust us, PC tuners are currently limited to receiving over-the-air (OTA) HDTV and unencrypted digital cable. When I had an HDTV tuner a couple of years ago, I could only pick up two 1080i OTA HD stations, and a few unencrypted 480i digital cable stations. Of course, all 60 of my analog cable stations were available, but they looked like crap on the HD projector connected to the PC. I finally gave up on using the PC as a TV. Dumped the HD tuner and grudgingly subscribed to satellite HDTV service.

Much the same story here in Australia, cable/satalite and tv anolouge reception is crap, it's like watching old worn vcr tapes. Free to air SD or HD TV is fine