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After cleaning up some of the scheduled recordings at night three 501 VODs showed up on my 722 this morning. I decided to order it since it was only $2.99. The initial start test took about 5 seconds and the movie started, but my 722 did not synch to my Panasonic 1080p plasma correctly because the picture was only half the screen at the left right corner. I remembered other members reported such issue and went into the HD setting changed the output to 480p then back to 1080i, that fixed it.

I don't have Bluray, but had the Toshiba HDDVR player and watched many rented HD movies then, but after learning the death of HDDVD, I returned my player back to Coscto. Back then I wasn't too much impressed by the HD DVD format, sure it might be of higher resolution and better sound, but the improvement certainly was not worth the money if you want to buy the disks as collection. And I had no intention to upgrade my DD5.1 DTS sound system nor my 720p HT projector to just get the better PQ and sound format either.

With that kind of bias in mind (which I want everyone to know before reading further), this time I simply turned off the sound so I could focus on inspecting the 1080p PQ of this $2.99 VOD from E*.

The PQ was excellent, inline with the best movie PQ I could recall seeing on my Toshiba HDDVD player. So my focus was turned to very close examination of any artifacts related to video compression.

The main artifacts of compression are usually motion related microblocking, lack of layers and depth in dark scenes, and similar effect in very bright scenes with a lot of white peaks.

I could not visibly detect any of the above compression related issues, and I did my inspection from about 3' away from the 50" 1080p screen. The HD PQ was near perfect from a practical standpoint. The reason I say "near perfect" is because this is a film based material. The true test of a 1080p picture quality will be for a video based show when the bandwith will be really in extremely high demand, and in which maybe a 25gig plus Bluray disk will really shine. Because I cannot imagine any HDDVR receivers capable of piping down or storing such large files, whether during a live show, or using VOD for later viewing.

So for 1080p movies at 24fps, from a practical standpoint, it should be as good as a true Blueray version of the same movie. I don't think when the studio agreed to sent E* a copy of its 1080p HD version movie, they would make such 1080p copy any less of a quality than the same Blueray copy used on a Bluray disk. But even if the Bluray folks may insist that the disk must be better because it stores a much bigger file than the DBS 1080p VOD can ever store on their HDDVRs, still your HD viewers will simply not be able to see any difference, at least for the vast majority of us.

Maybe for a few that have the best of the best equipment and watch a Bluray disk on a 120" or larger wide screen in a controlled home theater environment, they may notice something there, but since my HT projector is only 720p native, I did not care to test it, it would not have made any difference.

The only issue I have is the $6.99 price tag with the 24-hour viewing limitation. I cannot justify such expense with the prospect that we may not be able to finish the movie in time. We used to order HDPPVs a lot at $4.99/ea on our DirecTV HDDVR (my 722 was only recently installed) but stopped that after the 24-hour limit was put in place.