Dish HD vs SD PQ question?

[Kaydigi]

I finally will be able to step up to HDTV after I finish painting the house in the next couple of weeks.

On my 522 and 625 the SD channels look real bad sometimes. My locals in Richmond, VA (except UPN/CW) are terrible from Dish. Dark scenes in Lost and 24 look pretty bad. When the clock countdown comes on in 24 the background is washed out grayish and barely black with tons of macro blocking.

I can see compression artifacts etc. On national channels such as TNT, and The Science Channel. Shows likes Alias, Deep Space Nine which have numerous dark scenes show compression artifacts.

Well the point of this is how do the HD channels look? I’m aware of HD Lite, and basically what is going to stop E* from eventually treating their HD channels like the do the SD ones? Will watching SD content from the HD feed (ex TNT-HD) look better than watching the regular SD channel?

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Even with Hdlite, you are going to find that the picture quality is world's better.

Over the five years I had Dish SD on a Sony Trinitron WEGA 27" TV, I encountered lots of pixelization on many channels - when I first got Dish I was really frustrated with the quality and my sat installer even ran a test cable to make sure there wasn't a problem with the cable we were using. In the end, I realized it was that my tv was a early generation WEGA without 3:2 pulldown and many of the other technologies that improve picture quality in today's pc's.

Now I have a SONY 34" KD34XBR970, high def, with a 16x9 screen. The High Def channels are great. And the SD channels are clear, lacking the pixelization that I used to deal with on a regular basis. SciFi has always been one of the worst offenders on the old tv, but I watched Friday's Stargate Atlantis and it looked quite good - although nothing like watching stuff in HD. Maybe someday we will get SciFi in HD, but I'll enjoy what we have in the meantime!

As an aside, the old SONY 27" WEGA is now in my bedroom, receiving the second tuner output from my ViP622; and when I watch something from a HD channel on it, the picture is pretty much better than anything I ever saw on it when it was the main tv; even though the picture has been down-converted.

Mike

 

[Jim5506]

I find the Dish SD picture to be satisfactory, especially when you consider we are now taking pictures that were designed to be viewed on a 25 inch screen and viewing them at twice or greater the size.

On my 32 inch SD TV Dish SD channels look great, on my 90 inch projector, they are fair only because the pixel size at 480i has become large enough to be distracting.

The HD picture is super, most of the time it looks like "You Are There".

 

[nazz]

I've been noticing a lot of blocking and artifacts as well on SD and HD. I've only been with Dish since May and it seems worse lately to me. I have a ViP622 and am watching it on a 65" Mitsubishi RPTV WS65819. My signal strengths are always between 90 and 100 and I'm using a second dish for 61.5 instead of 129. I'm also cooling the unit with a laptop pad.

I switched from DirecTV to get Dish's better HD and generally it does look better but I'm surprised at the blocking I'm seeing on even full rez channels such as HBO and Showtime. The moving graphics on Showtime HD boxing were even doing it this past weekend. I've been thinking of starting a thread myself because I was thinking the problem was in my setup somewhere. Is this just normal with Dish?

 

[Kaydigi]

Thank you for the information.

While watching ALIAS today, a fan was rotating in front the main character in a counter clockwise motion. The macroblocking followed the blade as it circled the character three times. It was a hideous site to see, but hopefully SD shows on DISH HD channels will not have these problems.