I've been lurking this forum for quite a while now, and thought it was time to come out of the shadows and ask a question.
I have a Pioneer 610HD and a Dish 6000 receiver. I've been a Dish subscriber since 1992. When I first got my 610, I was amazed by the picture quality - the clarity and depth of detail. However, about 18 months ago the quality of Dish SD degraded something horrible. I don't even try to watch Enterprise on 238/236 anymore - I just sit there fuming. The walls behind the actors are a swirling mass of little boxes, when people move there is a pronounced "smear" until their faces catch up to their bodies, on a closeup of talking faces it looks like an impressionist painting - could be a face or it could be a wheat field, a sun or light bulb will have Saturn-like rings of boxes around it, when a scene goes dark you can see thousands of lighter boxes on the scren until they all finally, gradually repaint to black, and God forbid there should be a scene with smoke... the whole screen is just a useless blur of grey squares.
I noticed that this "phenomenon" had moved on to the pay channels and now last night we ordered "Gothika" on PPV and it was as bad as, if not worse than, Enterprise. What's up with that? $3.99 for an unwatchable mess?
At first I thought it was the TV, but DVDs, LDs and S-VHS all look flawless. Then I thought it was the 6000, but I use my old 5000 for taping, and it does the same thing. I've searched several forums and found many discussions of over-compression and such, although I haven't read any descriptions that match all of the things I'm seeing. Are the rest of you seeing this? Or am I taking one too many of the little blue pills each day?
I have a Pioneer 610HD and a Dish 6000 receiver. I've been a Dish subscriber since 1992. When I first got my 610, I was amazed by the picture quality - the clarity and depth of detail. However, about 18 months ago the quality of Dish SD degraded something horrible. I don't even try to watch Enterprise on 238/236 anymore - I just sit there fuming. The walls behind the actors are a swirling mass of little boxes, when people move there is a pronounced "smear" until their faces catch up to their bodies, on a closeup of talking faces it looks like an impressionist painting - could be a face or it could be a wheat field, a sun or light bulb will have Saturn-like rings of boxes around it, when a scene goes dark you can see thousands of lighter boxes on the scren until they all finally, gradually repaint to black, and God forbid there should be a scene with smoke... the whole screen is just a useless blur of grey squares.
I noticed that this "phenomenon" had moved on to the pay channels and now last night we ordered "Gothika" on PPV and it was as bad as, if not worse than, Enterprise. What's up with that? $3.99 for an unwatchable mess?
At first I thought it was the TV, but DVDs, LDs and S-VHS all look flawless. Then I thought it was the 6000, but I use my old 5000 for taping, and it does the same thing. I've searched several forums and found many discussions of over-compression and such, although I haven't read any descriptions that match all of the things I'm seeing. Are the rest of you seeing this? Or am I taking one too many of the little blue pills each day?
