So, I decided to hook up my PS2 earlier today to an old CRT TV and despite the 480p resolution, it actually looked pretty good... but that 480p TV is the family room TV and I'd far prefer to keep my PS2 in my room on my larger TV. Now, of course I don't expect my PS2 to suddenly be able to output at 720p TV simply because it's connected to the HDTV in my room, but it's a bigger TV and it's just more comfortable in my room, so that's why I want it there. However, when it's running and hooked up to my HDTV, everything looks like crap. Downstairs, on the CRT TV, it looked fine... surprisingly good, even. On my HDTV, it looks really blurry, the aliasing is quite exaggerated, and, subsequently, the shimmering effect is quite exaggerated. This HDTV isn't that much larger than the CRT TV downstairs so this isn't caused by the larger screen and I remember having such issues with other games, in the past... including my PS3 version of Oblivion when I tried using this TV without an HDMI cord. I don't know what the problem is, but essentially, everything looks like what one would expect from compression artifacts for gameplay footage.

I was playing Dragon Quest VIII, in particular, and tried everything from toggling the game's built in 16:9 aspect ratio feature to looking through the entire menu of my TV and I can't find anything to correct this issue. I've heard this is an issue with HDTVs, but I don't recall hearing any solutions or explanations. I'd really rather play on my TV in my room and eventually, CRT TVs will become so obsolete that I'll have to deal with this issue on all older console games... and that svcks because several of my favorite games of all time are for the PS2. Sony's ingenious cheapness means I cannot play these things on my PS3, which seems to do an excellent job of upscaling at least PS1 games, and I won't always ahve a CRT TV around, anyway... so what am I supposed to do? Why don't I have this issue when running games at 480p on an HD laptop screen but do with my TV? If it doesn't even work that well, why do some of my PS2 games even have the 16:9 aspect ratio? In what situation would this have been useful at all given how any widescreen TV must be HD and would ruin the image, anyway... or do not all HDTVs do this?

I've noticed the same problem with the Wii on my HDTV. Exact same boat as you, wondering why it looked so crummy. I searched around and the only help I could find was to buy component cables. Which did help, but only a little. Wish I could help more, but that's all I could find when I was looking in to it.

I sold my HDTV ages ago, but I remember PS2/PS1 games looked pretty good from a certain distance. As long as you don't sit too close you shouldn't notice the imperfections.