E* PQ on a Sony 36" XBR400.

[Ace]

If anyone is running their E* through a Sony 36" XBR t.v., how's the picture quality? My AT&T digital cable looks pretty good and I'm trying to find out if it will be worth it to switch to E*. Thanks in advance.

[MAllen]

I have a 36" Sony Wega that is ~1 year old that had slightly less picture quality than my 36" Mitsubishi (now in our BR) with a 5000 receiver. I replaced the main 5000 with a PVR 721 receiver on the Sony in late July and the picture is simply AWSOME. I don't know why but the picture is MUCH better (I also upgraded the LNBF on my Dish 500 to a DishPro Quad and also replaced some cables and eliminated an SW42 switch so those may have had an impact as well, you need HIGH QUALITY RG6 cable for DBS ).

[motjes2]

MAllen,

I just replaced the my 32" tube JVC with a 60" Grand Wega XBR LCD Rear Projector. Out of the box, the PQ from my 721 looked awful. Locals had a lot of artifacts, Espnews was unwatchable, Sport channels give you a headache because there is a lot of action (NBA LP, TNT, ESPN) with artifacts. The most decent channels, but still with artifacts, were the premium channels. International Dish Latino, to my surprise, was bad as well.

After searching on other forums, like avsforum.com, I have found other people with similar problems with their E* compressed SD signal. After tweaking the projector, and bringing down the sharpness, brightness, and picture level, the artifacts on the Locals and other channels have almost gone away. I still see them in the sports channel but I always saw them anyway in my 32" tube TV. Keep in mind that most 4:3 material, does not look good in any wide mode. With these new tweaks, I can watch Wide Zoom mode but 95% of the artifacts are gone. Once this was done I have a respectable TV to watch. I had to go to the service menu settings to do this.

By the way, I just got a letter from my local cable (cablevision) that they have upgraded their system and they are ready to provide digital cable. They also have all the sports pack, except football (which I do not care about). The one I really care about is MLB. They are offering basic for only ~ $10.00 (plus what ever the sport package costs). The basic package does not contain many channels. If E* does not provide MLB package next year, this will be the way to go for me. I will also check out how good their SD looks on my TV compare to E*'s compression.

[scooper]

Ace - first thing to do after you bring home the new TV - Get a copy of Video Essentials or Avia DVD's and perform the calibratrion routines from there (this is nothing more than tweaking the user accessible options). Even better would be an ISF specialist calibration.

Even after these, DBS PQ will not be equal to a good analog or digital picture - and the bigger the TV, the more the faults show up. Your set being an HDTV Ready set won't help on this score either - DBS' faults show up more on an HDTV Ready than on an analog set of the same size. You'll have to decide for yourself whether you like it or not. I think Dish's picture looks acceptable on a 27 inch Sony - but there you go...

[DoyleS]

I have to agree with Scooper. As a new Dish Subscriber, I am not overly impressed with the picture quality. On an 32" JVC, the picture looks very sharp but then as you look at the background you see posterization artifacts. Compared to Analog cable, the picture initially looks much crisper compared to the softer analog cable signal. But then you begin to see the artifacts. I watch most of my local broadcasts on HDTV using a Marquee projector and an 80 inch wide screen. I don't think I will be putting the Dish signal up on the projector because there are just to many artifacts that will get blown up on the big screen. All in all, I am disappointed with the Dish signal but do not plan to go back to Analog cable.
..Doyle

[John Corn]

I have a 2yr old 36" Sony Wega, my picture looks great.
I never had digital cable, when I switched from regular cable to Dish Network the picture was quit a bit better.

[MikeW]

It's been posted many times that you can reduce the artifacting by turning down the sharpness on your TV. I've found that if you turn the brightness and contrast down all the way, the artifacting completely disappears!:scratch:

[johnsmith22]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Personally I am pretty discerning when it comes to picture quality but, I have to say that I find the D* quality on a 36 inch TV to be quite acceptable in return for what I pay.

Without doubt quality is variable across the channels. My belief is that most of this variation is attributable to the quality of the feed received by Dish, i.e garbage in, gives garbage out rather than the quality of the Dish signal.

Yes it would be nice to get DVD quality on everything but there has to be a compromise somewhere between what people are prepared to pay and even more importantly the availability of frequency spectrum.

We live in a society of waste, where you get more food on your plate in a restaurant than you either need or can comfortably eat, where its cheaper to buy a new TV than have a TV repaired, where our cars guzzle gas, where everyone has to have the latest gizmo to put in that useless items cupboard that every home has and where we blatently misuse the frequency spectrum by having multiple repetitions of the same input material blasted at us from space.

Insisting on carrying locals for every market and must carry plus denying the merger are prime examples of only looking at one side of a story and forgetting the consequences of indiscriminate use of a precious asset. In my opinion, although the consequences are not nearly as severe they do fall into the same general category as destroying rain forests and producing acid rain.

Yes, technology can help and spectrum use is becoming more efficient all the time but the time is close where technology won't be able to help any more, then where do we go?

[Mike123abc]

I do not think it is so much the source feeds, they get the same satellite feeds that cable does. It has to do with how many channels they force on the transponder.

They get better CODECs but instead of improving the picture they use them to squeeze in more channels.

E* also downreses a lot to help with compression. It becomes more noticable on bigger sets with a soft picture.