[cjmcgee]

How does the picture quality compare between the various content providers? In my area I have the choice of TimeWarner, Dish and DirecTV. My main concern is how the SD channels will look on my HD TV (I am assuming the HD channels look good on all of them, which I could be wrong about...). I had Dish a year ago before I got my HDTV and even on my SD TV the channels all looked awful due to over-compression; they had a significant amount of MPEG artifacts that were quite noticeable on my SD TV. But, this was with a Dish 311 SD receiver.


TimeWarner cable does not compress the analog SD channels, so while they still don't look great on my HDTV there are no MPEG artifacts from over-compression; so I am figuring these channels probably look as good as they can get. That being said though, there are some things about cable I don't like and would like dish or direct to be an option for me.


Is my experience with the Dish311 representative of what I can expect from satellite, or are there better options for satellite? Would an HD receiver have made these SD channels look any better? Does DirectTV look better? Can either really compete with the uncompressed analog channels on cable?


Thanks!

 

[wmschultz]

Here we go..............

 

[mr. wally]

if your primary concern is sd pq, go with cable. but you may want to check out your local cable's sd pq first before signing up as a few local cable providers send a poor quality signal. but cable's pq will usually trump anything sent on satcos.

 

[cjmcgee]

Thanks for the feedback.


I do care about HD pq as well, but from what I gather it sounds like all the providers are pretty similar there. Is this correct? I do wish all programming was in HD; but I have had my HD TV about nine months now, and I still end up watching a lot of SD content. That is probably due to it still making up 90%+ of the content available to me :/


It doesn't seems like digital has to equal way worse picture quality. My DVDs which are digital still look very good on a 61" screen when upscaled to 1080p. DVDs are SD but look very good, where even the analog SD channels look quite a bit worse. This is probably due to DVDs being able to afford a 3 Mbps+ content stream, whereas the satellite providers (and probably digital cable) are compressing their streams down to a fraction of that.


My impression of the dish SD channels are that they were just compressing them way too much; to the point where the visual artifacts were horrid. If they just afforded each channel some more bandwidth they could look a lot better. Their transition to all mpeg4 could help, but it probably won't since they are changing to mpeg4 not to get more quality from the same bandwidth but to fit in twice as many channels into to the same bandwidth.


I have no experience with directTV; do they over compress their channels to the same degree as dish?

 

[gwsat]



Quote:
Originally Posted by cjmcgee /forum/post/0


I have no experience with directTV; do they over compress their channels to the same degree as dish?

Yes, at least. My son has both D* and cable. I have done A/B comparisons on his system and the PQ of D*'s HD (aka HD LITE) images was palpably worse than those he received via cable. You can check other threads here, and see that many, maybe most, others have seen the same thing.

 

[CPanther95]

Cable quality varies by area. Check your local area thread in the Local HDTV forum for comparisons of your system.


Closed.