vurbano said:
Excellent politically correct analysis.
Not trying to be politically correct because I am speaking in a D* forum but since now I have all three DBS providers in the market, I can tell you that to my naked eyes all three are at the same level of PQ. Last night NBC via D* sat had lots of pixelation problems with "Revelations". The problems occured during the thunderstorm. I read that others on Cable and OTA had the same problem. I wanted to record it OTA but I recorded the incorrect channel instead. Next time I will record the OTA feed and see if I see the same.
Nobody on the E* ( side) reports their PQ but there is also pixelation on TNTHD during basketball games. It is not perfect there either. We can go on and on about describing each channel and we all comeback to the conclusion - "they are all at the same level field".
I watched HDnet on both D* and E* for the past two days. According to others D* is downresizing HDnet to 1280x1080i while E* is keeping 1920x1080i (as far as we know, yet). I recorded HDnet on D* and kept watching E* and making the comparison (without any methods involved, just simple eye comparison). To my naked eye I could not see the loss of horizontal resolution. The details were there for both. I am sure someone with the technical equipment and knowledge will be able to proof the difference between the two and how much we are missing. But to my Tv which has a native resolution of 1280x768p (LCD) and 1280x720p (DLP), there was no meaningful difference that I could see.
It is my personal beleive that all DBS providers will move or have moved in that direction because of the bandwith constraint that they are experiencing now (who knows down the road what they are going to do). We all can scream about it but we as consumers are screwed since we do not contract the bandwith or the resolution. We contract the amount of channels (not even the quality!) and we all seem to be happy with it (which send the wrong message to the DBS providers).
So until there is another provider who makes quality (and not quantity) their priority, we always be screwed from all three DBS providers (soon to be two). When the new TVs (1080p) start selling, I know now that I will not be the fool to jump into buying them and expect that my PQ will be better with any DBS provider (unless there is a change in their policies). It will be dissapointing to say the least. As the old saying says, "garbage in garbage out".
Our salvation (PQ), at least for movies, will be HD DVD. There we will get the max bitrate and max resolution (hopefully, unless Hollywood wants to screw us also). That's where my hope is put at this point.
See I did not want to give you the long answer....
