Thread: Picture Quality Comparisons

Those of you who have both services concurrently, and those that have had both in the not too distant past, can you help me decide which service I should choose?

My house is pre-wired with RG6 in all rooms, single cable to each room, with junction box in a closet.

There are six RG6 cables coming in from outside of the house to junction box from where I can route one cable to each room.

Ideally, the system I choose should be able to support dual tuner receivers on a single cable.

I have two HD televisions and an HD projector. I watch a mix of SD & HD programming.


My current provider's picture quality leaves a lot to be desired, especially when I am watching SD on the projector. My primary decision criteria is picture quality, SD & HD. Which of the two have better picture quality in SD & HD?

From what I have seen, I give D* the edge in HD, but it varies from channel to channel.

I give E* a slight edge in SD, and again it varies channel to channel.

Just pick your provider by the content you want. Sd will be fine on smaller TVs but gets softer as you increase screen size. In HD there isn't enough difference to care IMHO. I watch a lot of SD and have a SDTV that I use only for SD.

I stated this in another thread just a few days ago. I have a Samsung LN40A550 LCD and my SD PQ is really, really, good from Dish, but I do agree that it does very by stations & programs.
Ghpr13

I am 100% completely satisfied with the SD and HD PQ from Dish Network.

With the quality of sd and hd reasonably comparable on both, I suggest you choose based on content. I picked Directv since they have the YES network and Dish doesn't. YMMV

If want eye-popping HD then get FiOS and a quality BD player (PS3). Additionally, there is a lot of sub-par or marginal programming out there being passed-off as HD...so garbage HD programming looks pretty much the same on any of the providers. You usually can't go wrong with HDNet, and FiOS SD cannot be touched (but who watches SD these days). Good luck in your search for HD with D* or E*.

My father has Dish, I have DirecTV. We have the same TV, Panasonic Plasma. I think they are comparable in quality. I think it comes down to content and price. Picture quality is very similar.

D'oh. I had posted some DIRECTV vs. Dish WA (Western Arc) vs. Dish EA (Eastern Arc) frame grabs here but it looks like the images are gone now.

Considering only SD picture quality and not HD or available content, Dish EA is superior to both Dish WA and DIRECTV. People can try to debate it if they want, but the simple facts are that Dish's excessive filtering on most major WA channels (on 119W) brings the effective resolution of the video well below the encoded 544x480, and DIRECTV softens their picture more than Dish does on EA. This can be verified by anyone who does their own comparison. Otherwise I wouldn't dare to make such a bold claim. Please note though that comparisons are harder to make accurately on CRTs and smaller flat-screen TVs than on computer monitors and larger flat-screens.

I don't want to start any arguments here. I'm just trying my best to present facts and findings. This is a breakdown of how much or how little destructive tampering is present in the video from each service.


The situation is that due to much less filtering on EA, much more vertical information is present than on WA. Also, with less filtering more horizontal information is almost unconditionally present on EA even with the 544x480 vs. 480x480 difference. One of the three-way comparisons I had done is reposted below to help make this clearer. If anyone is interested, there was another comparison I could repost that shows more effectively than this one that more horizontal detail is retained on EA than WA and DIRECTV even with the lower resolution than WA.


Dish Network WA - MPEG-2 on 119W:

The image above from 119W is the kind of picture most Dish customers are used to since most major channels are on 119W and are processed in this manner (except when certain commercials are inserted by Dish and the video is virtually untouched). There is:
- Heavy vertical edge enhancement (blurry glow on many horizontal edges such as the mountain tops, blurry darkening on some horizontal edges that artificially thickens them, and general distortion of the whole picture),
- Tampering with the levels so that colors are washed out and unbalanced (look at the grass, leaves, and unnaturally darkened sky),
- Shifted chroma (red and green bleeding out of the right side of leaves), and
- Lots of mosquito noise around the tree branches.


DIRECTV - MPEG-2 on 101W:






The DIRECTV image above is soft and lacking details, but there's no edge enhancement (including no artificial sharpening of edges that are supposed to be somewhat soft like the tree branch in the upper-left corner), no distracting distortion, no color damage, and no chroma shifting that I can see. Far less mosquito noise as well. With its many problems, the Dish WA image may still look more detailed in some areas by comparison, but most (not all) of this comes from the edge enhancement brightening/darkening and/or merging details and/or artificially sharpening edges so that some things stick out more than they normally would.


Dish Network EA - H.264 on 72.7W:






The Dish EA image is similar to the DIRECTV image in that the image hasn't been tampered with much compared to Dish WA. There is also much less softening and loss of detail. The rescaling to 480x480 slightly softens the image horizontally and may occasionally cause some rainbow artifacts, but the 544x480 on WA and 480x480 on DIRECTV both suffer from the same problems. Also notice that the EA image is filling the sides of the frame rather than having unused horizontal lines on the left and right. I have no doubt that EA isn't as crisp as the source feed, but all things considered there isn't much detectable tampering in this image.

Just to be clear, I am not saying here that 480x480 is always better than 544x480. I am just pointing out that if you have video at 544x480 that has been heavily tampered with so that a large amount of detail is lost, it is possible (and is the actual case here) that you can have less filtered video at 480x480 that has more detail. Factors such as resolution and bitrate play a certain role in picture quality, but there are far too many other factors involved to ever consider just those alone.


Hope this info is helpful, and I apologize if this response is too technical. Just look at the pictures and make up your own mind what you like best.