Just got digital cable - Why does the picture look bad?
 

I'm noticing that most of my new stations have what looks like digital compression - blockiness. It's not extremely obvious, but it's there. Is this normal?

yep. digital cable sucks. from what i remember, it's not even really a digital source like a dish would be.

Channels above 100 are digital. Channels below 100 are still analog.

Digital cable is not HDTV in case you were misled... :)

Maybe you have only been watching The Blair Witch Project... other programs should be better.

My digital cable is hit and miss. Some of the channels above 100 look really great, some look absolutely horrible (compression)

Many of my digital cable channels looked like Monet had gotten ahold of them.

But I don't have that problem any more (except when the wind blows or it rains -rolleyes-)... :lol:

Simple explanation, because digital cable sucks.

I have it too, most of my channels are pretty good, but I do have some bad ones.

<BLOCKQUOTE> • Quoth Y2K Falcon •<HR SIZE=1>But I don't have that problem any more (except when the wind blows or it rains -rolleyes-)... :lol: <HR SIZE=1></BLOCKQUOTE>

:lol: Yeah, Sat sucks. I'm burdened with all these HQ channels and customer service that has the audacity to treat me with respect. They don't even know me! What gives them the right to treat me that way?

das

I mostly get problems when I first tune in a channel, but they quickly dissapate.

When the guy checked your line quality, how good was it? Once I learned that our cable went thru 6 splitters before it got to the main TV. fixing that helped our signal a bit.

Sattelite has its own problems with compression artifacts too though.

You should have a cable guy come and check your wiring/splitters/etc. For the longest time our picture was REAL crap, and higher channels would black out for minutes or even hours at a time. We called the cable guy and it was our splitters. Now we never have the black-out problem (although once in a great while a mass amount of channels will go blank for an hour or so, obviously something afoul at Comcast HQ), and picture quality for the most part is......good. Could be better.

I had the chance to finally see DirecTV in action this weekend for the first time. Damn what a difference from cable. DirecTV KILLS digital cable...at least my provider. The picture quality was absolutely amazing....its definetly making me want to jump ship to satelite.

I would say the actual digital channels looks as good as my DirectTV but the analog look bad.

Digital Cable is expensive and there's no friggin Boomerang. :(

As soon as I figure out how, I'm switching to dish.

Step 1: Get a dish.

Step 2: Install it.

Step 3: Watch TV.

I can help you out with the details. :D

Yep, Cable tries to sell Digital as an HDTV like experience. They try to stuff all sorta channels into a small copper pipe. Some cable companies can succeed at this if they are using fibre optics.

DirecTV is doing well tho, they have a lot of HDTV channels, and will probably have 2-4 HDTV NFL games per week! :D