Convert a B&W TV to display 1080i?

[Whirled One]

From the pie-in-the-sky department:

Today I happened to be thinking about that new Coby HD ATSC tuner that I posted about over in the 'Solid State' forum (http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/sho...d.php?t=237955), and it occured to me-- I wonder if it might be feasible to convert an old B&W TV to display in HD, using one 'channel' of the analog component outputs on an HD ATSC tuner (or other HD video device, such as a Blue-Ray player) as a video source. If an old TV could be converted, a B&W set would be better suited than a color set for a variety of reasons. Among other things-- (a) the CRT resolution isn't limited by a shadow mask and phosphor pattern (as it is on a color CRT), and (b) the 2nd anode voltage is less "fussy" on a B&W CRT. Plus, you don't have to worry about converting colors from standard component outputs to RGB, or do any other goofing around with color decoding.

The vertical sweep is no problem, since it's still 60 Hz at 1080i or 720p. The horizontal sweep frequency would have to be more than doubled, however, for displaying 1080i (and even more so for 720p). Even if you could get the horiz oscillator running at the correct frequency, I wonder how badly the HV output would suffer, since that's generated off of the horiz oscillator. Would a totally different flyback be necessary? Of course, you could always either add in a separate high voltage power supply just to provide the 2nd anode voltage to the CRT, or leave the entire original horizontal section alone (and just use it for producing the HV supply), and add a new, separate, horizontal osciallator circuit to provide the actual video sweep.

Another thought-- I'd imagine this would require a rather complex scan converter, but what if a 1080i signal could be converted to a sort of "quad" interlace format? In other words, leave the field rate at 60 Hz, but put 4 interlaced fields per frame instead of 2? You'd have to add in some time to allow for the extra vertical retrace periods though. If this could be done though, that would cut the displayable horizontal lines per field down to 540, so even if you add in the non-displayed vertical retrace period, you're still almost certainly going to be well within the range that a standard 525-line NTSC TV can produce (and lock-in) just with the service controls.

Another thing-- what's the usual video bandwidth on a 1080i analog component signal? It'd be one thing to just get the scan rates right, but how much vertical resolution can one really eeke out of a typical B&W TV, even when bypassing the RF/IF stages?