A picture quality/compression question for the techies

[IanJames]

I stay in a house in Palm Springs california which is serviced by Time Warner Cable. A service which should by all accounts be very similar to Shaw cable.
The TV is a new, garden variety 720p plasma. The HD picture quality is STUNNING in comparison to our cable HD.
HD hockey on the regional Fox sportsnets was super sharp.
Cable news, NBC, CBS etc are all head and shoulders above ANYTHING we get from our Canadian cable and phone company providers. The only picture quality that comes close is BELL satellite.

I've combed these boards and seen bushels of posts about the differences in packages, menus, prices and NONSENSE between the various Canadian (soviet) TV providers. There are even some who discuss at length the picture quality (for me, having owned ALL of the big three HD services I rank them thusly: 1) BELL satellite 2) Telus 3) Shaw)

But NONE of them hold a candle to the picture I see in California.

I suspect it's the greedy Canadian telecommunication giants compressing the be-jeezuz out of the signals to save their precious, over priced bandwidth resulting in blocky backgrounds, pixilated sports, and general YUCK. I watched THE VOICE last night here in Vancouver and Carson Daly's jacket was so blotchy and full of digital pixel movement I was convinced it was alive and poised to attack Christina Aguilera. But seriously, the set and black background on that show is grey, murky and noisy. Awful (I currently have Telus Optik)

And before anyone jumps on my monitor or TV or wiring. Stop. When I play a DVD or stream fro AppleTV on any of my plasmas the picture is GREAT.

So? What gives folks??

[jshel101]

From what I read, Shaw is uncompromising their signals for their new Exo offering. Not sure if this is across the board or only in areas that the network has been upgraded in.

[IanJames]

I read about the "uncompressed" feature of Shaw EXO and got excited so I called shaw and asked about it. Their techs could not explain it and preferred to talk about 1080p video on demand. When I asked where I might see the new product they suggested to go to the Shaw head office in Vancouver where it was "on display". When I got there I did see it operating, but it was 14 feet above the floor in the main foyer. They were nice enough to give me the remote to fool with and the interface is fine. Very OPTIK in fact. But frankly the picture did not appear to be any better. In fairness it was difficult to tell because of the TV placement, but the SD signal sure looked rotten, and when I found some sports it STILL looked pixillated even from that distance.

Really frustrating.

[mmmbiscuits]

It's a shame we lag behind US in what you're talking about, for my opinion I have a friend who has Telus and I find my shaw quality is much greater and more detailed.

But I still crave what we all get "sold on" in what TRUE HD Television is and that unfortunately is what the states seem to have!

[IanJames]

you don't know what you're missing till you see it.

[ShawnB]

everything is better in the US except health care.
To much effort to keep things "canadian" whatever that means, so we suffer and go without because we think it's better somehow but the anti US feeling is to strong

[DSgamby]

Really, the Canadian Health Care system is better than the US one?

The only thing the Canadian Health Care system is better than the US is that the citizens don't have to pay at the hospital for stuff that is done at the hospital. Of course, that is a moot point when you have to wait 6 months for an appointment for a brain tumor in which you could be dead.

[Arthur Dent]

Originally Posted by IanJames

There are even some who discuss at length the picture quality (for me, having owned ALL of the big three HD services I rank them thusly: 1) BELL satellite 2) Telus 3) Shaw)

" But seriously, the set and black background on that show is grey, murky and noisy. Awful (I currently have Telus Optik)"

Do you see the discrepancy in your rant? Whatever influences you were under when you decided that Shaw is worse than Telus, stop them, they are dangerous.

You don't need to go to the US to find out that Telus provides the worst possible HD quality in the Western hemisphere, you could have just asked.

Get a $10 antenna, tune in to your Vancouver OTA CTV station, and see quality that is better than whatever you saw on cable down in the states. Or switch TV providers to anything other than Telus.

[Neocratic]

You can't really compare the different providers unless you have the same set up for all of them. I have shaw cable and the picture on both my tvs is completely different (one plasma, one LCD). My LCD picture looks dark and washed out whereas my plasma is bright and crisp. I have tried different settings but can not get the LCD to come close to the plasma. I have also watched Comcast in the US and noticed the same things depending on where I have stayed and also what channel I am watching.

[JamesK]

But I still crave what we all get "sold on" in what TRUE HD Television is and that unfortunately is what the states seem to have!

Back in January, I stayed at a hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. The HDTV was excellent there too. I'm on Rogers and of the understanding that they don't compress as much as others, but it still could be better.

[GamerGuy]

I definitely see a difference in quality between the programs/stations. When I'm at my desk, my face is <2 feet from my 40" LCD. Shows like Survivor for example, look spectacular, even up close. Where other shows look ok from a distance but look bad up close. This is with the TV reporting 1080i on both stations/programs. No stretching or anything.

What annoys me more is the screen pixelation from time to time. My Pace box did the same thing. Though it always included an audio cut out, the Gateway continues to correctly play the sound, mostly. It does go maybe 5% of the time.

[CHrisCHu]

Originally Posted by ShawnB

everything is better in the US except health care.
To much effort to keep things "canadian" whatever that means, so we suffer and go without because we think it's better somehow but the anti US feeling is to strong

I have to disagree, not about the off-topic health care thing but the on-topic HD quality thing.

I used to live in the US back in 2006-08 where HD broadcast and providers really took off (number of HD channels more than doubled in the timer period). Even national networks lowered bitrates to cramp subchannels into a single physical channel. I had Comcast all that time when at first in 2006 HD qualities were great with very little re-compression. As time moved on, Fios (Fiber-optics to home) became a bigger competition and the stupid race to get "the most HD channels" began. As every new HD channel added, Comcast looked for more bandwidth by re-compressing existing channels. By mid-2008, re-compression on some HD channels were absolutely ridiculous (<8Mbps bitrate). Any motion in a 24fps movie (yes, Comcast managed to show movies in 24fps to dramatically reduce bandwidth without sacrificing quality) resulted in macro-blocks to the point the quality was way worse than SD. I moved out of US at that time and back to my home land Vancouver where HD broadcast and providers were about to take off like they did in US a few years prior. Shaw has been doing OK with no re-compressing local network channels (CBC, GLB, CTV) up until last year or so. I can see the same stupid race to get "the most HD channels" all over again. Shaw now re-compresses all local network channels and even with their recent analog shutdown to release tons of bandwidth we still suffer from those re-compressed channels. Now that Shaw dropped HDNet and there are so many more contents I can get from local broadcast thru' OTA (I have a 3-HD-tuner setup with SageTV which works better than Shaw's). These days 90% of the TV programs I watch come from OTA and I foresee dropping Shaw and use pure OTA in the near future.

[IanJames]

I just checked out a friends Shaw set which uses the Motorola DCT 3416. Not terribly impressed at the PQ. Is the Gateway/EXO/Arris box an improvement on picture quality or just the guide, graphics and PVR?

[TheFuzz]

I've got a 3416 and the quality at times can be ridiculous. I watch on a 96" screen, so the blemishes are painfully obvious. You can see jpeg like artifacts around the text, to the degree of a low quality jpeg export form photoshop. Fast moving scenes result in macroblocks that can be 3" large.

I really should take a picture one day, and compare it to my computer that output's at the projectors native resolution of 720p. Those images look gorgeous. its one of the saddest things about "HD". You know it's 720p, but when those pixels are used to make macro blocks it's just kind of depressing. Like going to the prom with the prom queen, except her parents put a bag over her head before they let her out of the house. They were nice enough to cut out eyeholes though, so there is that.

[IanJames]

I just heard from another member that the 3416 is at least two generations worse than the PQ on the ARRIS. Anyone with real world comparisons?