Technician coming

[Sharpie]

Well, after much belly-aching with Directv's customer service they have finally agreed to send out a technician to look at my setup free of charge. I have been getting a very pixelated, grainy picture for awhile (6 months) so I threatened to leave them and go with Dish and boy did that change the situation. I will say they tried to help me best they could over the phone but nothing seemed to help. Is there anything that I should make sure I ask the technician when he comes to my place? Also, when I brought up that I thought the problem was due to over compression the customer service rep assured me that can not be the case because my other tv's did not show this. My other tv's are your typical tube tv's but the tv having a problem is my HD ready set. So I don't know, I am not overly technically savvy. I have tried adjusting the tv but that did not help and some channels are not as bad as others. Anyway, if there are questions that I definitely should ask please let me know. Thanks.

 

[ramcm7]

Is this a new HD set, coinciding with your noticing the grainy picture? Part of the issue may be somewhat compression related in that I assume your HD set is larger than your other TV's. The picture can look fine on the smaller sets, but when you stretch it out on a bigger TV, you lose some of the detail you thought you had.

 

[slacker9876]

If you look at this post there is a response from DirecTV about my PQ issues. I think it might be related to your situation as well. Basically it states that their signal is optimized for 4:3 TV's that are 36" and smaller in size.

 

[Sharpie]

When I first go Directv (5 years ago) the picture was great. I was really surprised at just how good the picture was. But about 6 months ago it went to hell. Maybe I am a perfectionist but I swear when I first got satellite the picture quality was that of a dvd if not better. I bought my HD set the same time I got satellite and it is a 4:3 aspect ration where todays models are all 16:9. The pixelation and grainy picture was so bad that during the PGA championship on USA the golfball was blurred and the green was all patchy. I mean, even my wife noticed the crappy picture. I don't know, I just want my picture quality to be comparison to a dvd. Is that wishing too much? What do you guys think, does a dvd show a better picture quality than that of a straight satellite signal. I told Directv that I was planning to upgrade to the HD setup after the new year but would not do so until they could prove to me that the picture quality on "regular" satellite could be improved on my set.