as far as 'all' c-band reception being superlative, that was far from the case...those early systems used prehistoric feed electronics, and that, together with the very low power of the first-generation birds, resulted in lots of 'sparklies', the analog equivalent of pixellation....
but was it 'better' to have a dish back then? certainly not as compared to today's 'set and forget' systems, from a purely media-consumer perspective...but from a 'doing what no one else is' and 'seeing what you're not meant to see' and just plain cool cachet perspective, there was nothing like it.....
also, even after the 'perfection' of home c-band systems, i would still frequenty note those 'sparklies' occurring in extreme-color-saturation areas of pictures, often just briefly as an image was coming in or going off...reds were the most notorious for this, with orange and blue not far behind...the reason for it, as i understood it, was something called 'de-emphasis'...apparently due to an unequal effect of space transit on various parts of the signal, some portions of uplinks are 'emphasized', or, boosted...then at the sat receiver, 'de-emphasis' is done to balance things back out...but it's an imperfect process, particularly with consumer-grade gear...i have seen this 'bright color' sparkling on off-air and dbs as well, and know to attribute it to sourcing from analog satellite transmission
