people asked for it, I posted it.


Thanks.

Read the recent Marketnews article, the picture on Bell is the best HD in Canada, no matter what the companies who don't carry as much HD try to say.I don't know how many of you read the article from MarketNews workforbell posted (I doubt many did: it takes 9 pages on my regular size font 1600x1200 LCD screen), but I did.

In short, it is a Gospel of Pat Button, VP Marketing at BEV.
He had a 10 year stint at Sony, then Samsung, now BEV (his Sony heritage shows when he calls a FireWire connection i.Link, obviously minimum computer experience).

This is probably the relevant part workforbell was refering to:
"Bell ExpressVu has a special room in its network operations centre in Toronto where it can conduct side-by-side comparisons of different carriers’ HD services. The room has two ISF-calibrated Pioneer plasma displays, as well as a sound system featuring a premium Denon A/V receiver and 5.1-channel speaker system from PSB. PVR equipped set-top boxes from different carriers can feed either of the Pioneer displays.
When I visited, Bell ExpressVu was comparing a high-def program from Discovery Canada’s HD channel. One of the plasma sets was showing Bell ExpressVu’s feed, the other was showing a high-def feed from Rogers Cable. There was no doubt that the ExpressVu version had visibly better detail and colour."

I.e. it is done in a BEV controlled environment run by BEV people on a particular channel. Hard to call comparison "objective" to say the least.
But wait, right next to it:

"I asked to see a broadcast channel, and we switched to the two services feed of PBS, which was showing a documentary with a good detail of archival film footage. The grainy program material was clearly a torture test for the MPEG decoders all along the chain. This was an apples-and-oranges test, Button maintained, because the Rogers feed was coming from a Buffalo PBS affiliate, while the ExpressVu feed was coming from Boston. Nonetheless, Rogers had the advantage. It had fewer artifacts and looked generally cleaner."

The bolded text shows they (was it the reporter or Button?) don't have a clue about enoding/compression - but what else would you expect from sales people?

Morale: How many Best-Buy sales guys have you seen you could trust? I thought so, neither did I. The article is exactly the same, but on a VP level.

Yeah... Want to see Pat Button's pictire? Here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marketnews/85750596/in/set-1830703/) you go. Very trusting face, isn't it?

Diogen.

EDIT:
Almost forgot, this is what Pat Button had to say about OTA HD reception:
"There’s probably a handful of people who are actually doing this properly, who would actually be able to make that claim...",
i.e. people are a dumb herd of sheep and we are going to show them what the future is all about.

Yes the SD pbs didn't look as good due to the mpeg conversion.

Yes the SD pbs didn't look as good...Can you point me to where it says those were SD channels? BEV has two HD 1080/60i PBS channels.
... due to the mpeg conversion.What the f**k does this statement mean?
Conversion between what? TS-PS? HD-SD? 720-1080? Interlaced-Progressive?
Done when? Before transmitting? After receiving? Before displaying?
Done were? In the receiver? In the TV?
Converting what? Color space? Chroma/Luma sampling?

You sound like a preacher that knows a few verses and uses them any chance he gets.

Diogen.

"I asked to see a broadcast channel, and we switched to the two services feed of PBS, which was showing a documentary
with a good detail of archival film footage. The grainy program material was clearly a torture test for the MPEG decoders all along the chain."

The 'broadcast channel'(s) that were shown were SD, (ask the writer of the article), the Bell version was digital mpeg, the Rogers was analouge.

workforbell,-

could you please disclose your area of expertise, even simpler: are you a techie or not?

I haven't seen a single statement of yours that wouldn't fall apart without too much digging: from securing Nagra, to Linux, to packages on StarChoice, to HD comparison, to mpeg conversion.

At least I would know what of yours statements should be just ignored.

Diogen.

Yeah... Asking the writer what he meant I'll leave to you.

Read the recent Marketnews article, the picture on Bell is the best HD in Canada, no matter what the companies who don't carry as much HD try to say.
I have just tried bell and SC HD because I wanted to see which had better HD quality. Bell won hands down. Even their SD channels are way better.