Dish Network Picture quality vs digital cable ?

[gurevise]

Hi Guys,
I have noticed that digital cable has picture quality problems similar to Dish. Digital Cable has about 2 seconds pause between switching channels. All this tells me that they use very similar technology to transmit signal over the coax as Dish uses to beam signal from the satellites. If this is true then there should not be much difference between them as far as picture quality concern.

Question: What is the practical and theoretical difference of picture quality between Dish and digital cable?

Thanks
Sergey

[bearklaw]

The question is how much either Dish or the cable company compress the picture when encoding it. (Both use a lossy compression method.) In my area (San Francisco) the cable company compresses the heck out of it digital signals to try to cram as many channels as possible through its cables, which are very outdated. (They are in the process of upgrading their cable infrastructure, but most neighborhoods have wiring installed 50 years ago!)

If Dish adds more channels without adding more satellites, picture quality will get worse. Right now, at least in my area, both Dish and DirectTV have signicantly better picture quality then cable. Some of my friends live on the peninsula 20 miles south of here, and their cable company has a picture that I would say is equivalent to what I get with Dish.

So the answer has to be "it depends". If you have friends with a DBS system and friends with cable, compare their pictures. One of the best tests is to watch something with a lot of high speed picture changes, such as a basketball game - compression artifacts are the most pronounced in that kind of picture.

-BearKlaw

[DarrellP]

Channel tuning with digital takes longer. Digital has to lock on to a key frame that is transmitted like every 1/2 second or so.

If you guys think Dish & Digital cable take a long time to tune, it takes up to 6 seconds to tune in some of my OTA digital channels, so be happy with what you have. Channel surfing is Gone With The Wind in the Digital Age, that's why we have Electronic Program Guides.

[wmayo]

Comparing Adelphia digital cable here in VA, the digital cable looks MUCH better on HBO and many other station, but not all (WE for example). Even the analog looks better than any Dish network feeds. But only Dish has HDTV for me though.

[Mike123abc]

It depends on the cable company if they are a modern one with 256 QAM and 750MHZ+ transmission capability they have 2X the capacity of Dish. So, they can carry more channels and/or compress them less.

But, there are a lot of the old creaky cable systems out there that barely get snow through.

[AkShark]

How many of you have true digital cable? My local cable company is still trying to pass off their digital service with boxes the still have only a composite output!! And they want 70 bucks a month for service with only 1 premium (HBO) channel.. No thanks I take Dish!

[Mike123abc]

Where I am they have true digital cable... They carry more HBOs, Showtimes, all the Cinemaxs, etc. They pretty much carry every channel that Dish offers in the Everything Package. But they cost $50/month more than Dish, and Dish has HDTV, so I go with Dish.

[zztzed]

Originally posted by DarrellP
Channel tuning with digital takes longer. Digital has to lock on to a key frame that is transmitted like every 1/2 second or so.
That's not entirely true. While E* and D* IRDs do wait for an I (key) frame before they display a video stream, they don't have to, and in fact some digital tuners (at least, the Motorola digital boxes used by the cable company in my town) will construct an image out of the B and P frames that describe the differences between each frame. The result is that it seems to tune faster, but the resulting image is incomplete and looks kind of crappy until an I frame comes down the line.