I've been using a Dishplayer 7200 for a few years now and am wondering about the picture quality I get with this DVR vs. the new DVR's (eg. 510, upcoming 522). There is no setting that I'm aware of on the DishPlayer to select the picture quality (for example I know on ReplayTV boxes you can select the picture quality and the # of hours that can be recorded adjusts accordingly). I notice pixilation (especially on very dark backgrounds such as night scenes). Is the picture quality on the newer DVRs better?

I have a 510 receiver and I notice pixilation when the picture has black background. I'm new to dish and I haven't used any other receivers before. This pixilation is annoying which I have never seen when I had cable.

All Dish DVRs are the same, in fact all Dish receivers have the same picture quality. The reason you don't have an adjustment for picture quality on a DVR unit is because instead of converting the digital signal to analog then back to digital to store on the hard drive, they just store it exactly as it comes.

As for the second post, regular cable is analog and it would never have pixelization, but many be fuzzy at times. Digital cable has the same problems. Depending on how much the company compression the signal, you'll notice the pixelization more or less. Hope this helps.

I don't think that's quite true. The new receivers are using newer decoding chips and they may be somewhat better (or worse) than the old ones

That's true, but since I don't notice a difference in picture quality from the oldest Dish receivers compared to the newest I doubt we'll notice a difference in the next ones coming out.

That's disappointing. I was really hoping it was my receiver that was the source of this problem. I don't notice it on my TV with a non-DVR receiver, but it's only a 20 inch TV, so maybe the problem is not as magnefied as it is on my 51 inch TV.

Absolutely, the larger the screen size the more likely you are to see the Digital artifacts. All Digital compression introduces these types of artifacting. The degree of degradation depends on the amount of compression. The more data you try to cram down a limited diameter pipe the the lower the resoultion of the picture.

Both DirecTV and Dish have decided to send more content instead of sending higher quality Picture Quality as this is what the majority of people want more channels and "THEIR" own local channels. Since this eats up bandwidth quickly the PQ will not increase much in the short term.

John