A month or so ago, I got a new Dish HD DVR. I'm feeding my Panasonic AX100u 720p projector from the Dish DVR with HDMI. I also have a VGA feed from an HTPC to my projector as well; my HTPC runs BeyondTV.

Yesterday, I noticed "Blast from the Past" was on local channel 20 (I'm in Houston). For some reason, 20 isn't in HD on Dish...anyway, I pulled it up. And the quality was HORRIBLE - very very dark and very very pixelated. Really looked nasty.

So, just for the heck of it, I pulled it up in BeyondTV...and it was be-yoo-tiful. I mean, it wasn't HD quality, but it was night and day difference between BeyondTV through VGA and Dish DVR through HDMI.

Anybody got any ideas on that? I'm guessing Dish's de-interlacer/de-scaler/whatever isn't as good as BeyondTV's, or else they're not using the "native" digitized version of channel 20 and are doing their own analog-to-digital capture before sending it up to the satellite, but who knows...all I know is that I certainly wasn't expecting that.

I'm tempted to try a different feed to the projector from the Dish DVR - maybe component, see if it's any different.

The picture quality of Dish's local channels in SD has been notoriously awful for years now. Easily the worst of the lot.

Probably their way of showing their resentment for being forced to carry them.

<slaps head for being an idiot>

This didn't COMPLETELY solve my problem, but it did make the picture quality a lot better. I didn't realize the guy who set up my system for me didn't set the output to 720p (my projector is 1280x720). Huge difference in picture quality on the HD channels, slightly-above-marginal difference in picture quality on SD channels - I'm guessing either the built-in deinterlacer/scalar hardware in the Dish DVR is better than the onboard one in my Panny AX100u projector or else something's getting deactivated in my projector when it gets an HDMI signal.

It didn't make a big difference on the local SD channels, but it did improve them a little; still looks better with my HTPC and OTA tuners.