Dish Signal Quality

[thebert99]

A friend of mine called a local Dish/DirecTV retailer to sign up for Dish, and the retailer told him that he should sign up with DirecTV because it had a better signal. He said that Dish compresses their signal more than DirecTV, and since DirecTV had more satellites now, it was better (PQ). Is this true at all? This doesn't sound right...

 

[wh5916]

A friend of mine called a local Dish/DirecTV retailer to sign up for Dish, and the retailer told him that he should sign up with DirecTV because it had a better signal. He said that Dish compresses their signal more than DirecTV, and since DirecTV had more satellites now, it was better (PQ). Is this true at all? This doesn't sound right...

If we're talking SD signals, it certainly wasn't true when I switched to Dish Network from DirecTV in January of this year. Picture quality of both services can't be described as DVD quality, but Dish was head/shoulders above DirecTV--I was totally amazed, as this was completely unexpected. It should be noted that I wasn't switching because of image quality...DirecTV's rates were simply getting too high, and Dish had a cheaper package that I was willing to accept...improved image quality was simply a surprise bonus--a bonus that I wasn't counting on, based upon past experience.

I had switched providers only one other time, from Dish to DirecTV in late 1998. At that point, DirecTV's image quality blew Dish away...then DirecTV started adding local channels months later, image quality went downhill, and never again approached what it had been during my first year as a subscriber. Worse, every time they launched a new satellite, they used it simply to add more programming, instead of improving image quality.