I heard Sateliete offers the best HD picture quality? Is this true, and is it actually noticeable in practice? How about Verizon Fios? Please advise.

I heard Sateliete offers the best HD picture quality? Is this true, and is it actually noticeable in practice? How about Verizon Fios? Please advise.
Actually, over-the-air channels have the best quality, as there's no compression.
Then it's a tie more or less with the two cable tv services [yes, Verizon comes into your home on a cable, though it may be one of glass] then satellite.
All has to do with how much your cable or satellite service likes to compress its signals, and it changes with the company, and viries within even one company's service area.
There really isn't any independent quality control ... all services say they're the best.
Compression rates are the key.

where exactly are you located?
are you in a TWC or Cablevision area?

FiosTV isn't even offered in NYC.

I heard Sateliete offers the best HD picture quality? Is this true, and is it actually noticeable in practice? How about Verizon Fios? Please advise.
Do a search for HD-Lite with respect to the DBS providers. The correct answer is that it depends. For satellite - is the channel over compressed Mpeg-2 on the older satellites or is mpeg-4 on the new DirecTV satellites? Will DirecTV start over compressing the mpeg-4 HD channels to add more channels down the road? Does the local cable company recompress the HD channels because of bandwidth limits. Verizon is at the moment probably the best choice for picture quality short of putting up your own C-band dish as Verizon Fios has the bandwidth to spare. But 3 or 4 years from now? Who knows?

OTA can be the best picture quality for the broadcast networks (and via Verizon Fios which passes the locals through as is) provided the local station has not added multiple SD sub-channels.

I see you are new here and posting all the asked many times before questions. Spend several days reading the current posts to learn rather than starting these polls. Also don't start new threads in the Local reception forum.

i'm in queens so I have Time Warner Cable. There is no Fios TV in queens. Also, over the air HDTV is much better then cable TV? Will they are broadcast over the air 1080p?

1080p? not anytime soon.
would you convert to 1080p after spending millions of dollars on new equipment.

for me, 1080p is reserved for select ps3 games, HD-DVD & Blu-Ray Discs.

you should join us TWC New yorkers here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=297592&page=346&pp=30

i'm in queens so I have Time Warner Cable. There is no Fios TV in queens. Also, over the air HDTV is much better then cable TV? Will they are broadcast over the air 1080p?
Depends on the cable system. Some add more compression to the locals, some don't. You can not generalize with cable systems because it varies from system to system.

First, what do you mean by 1080p? 1080/24p? 1080/60p? 1080/24p is a ATSC broadcast standard, but no one is using it and no one is likely to use it any time in the foreseeable future. So, no, they will not be broadcasting 1080p over the air nor on cable. All cable and broadcast systems will stick with 720/60p and 1080/60i for some years to come. Besides, you can get 1080p for film based sources if the TV correctly implements 3:2 pulldown or has a 72 Hz "3:3" pulldown capability. Don't get too hung up on 1080p as a signal source.

Continue discussion in one of the NYC threads. See the Index at the top of the forum.

Closed.