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In Reply to: Digital vs Analog Cable... Not real impressed. posted by AbeCollins on August 03, 2003 at 09:59:17:
I don't find either to be all that special. It's more marketing: digital is perfect, right? There's no distortion with digital, right? Everything will look good, right? Right... And you don't have to hold your CDs by the edges or take care of them, either.Honestly, I thought digital satellite looked like steaming poo the first time I saw it. Very blocky from the compression, differences between the colors is severe, etc. You could tell it was digital just by looking at it. Same thing with digital cable... it was nice having the extra channels, but how many of them were being watched? The simple fact is that the cable companies get the increased bandwidth of cable, then jack them so full of extra signals that they look worse than before. I'm resigned to the fact that the only way we're going to get better pictures is from HD signals being broadcast or shot down the wires properly.
Another problem... Time Warner was pushing their digital cable in the south Atlantic states wiht the guarantee that you'd be able to go back to analog if you didn't like it after the trial period. Guess what happened if you didn't like it? That's right, boys and girls... you were stuck with it... increased price tag and all. Their reason? They were converting to digital completely. This was two or three years ago. Would you believe you can still order basic analog cable from them to this day? Strange...
Follow Ups:
I've noticed that on dark scenes I get a lot of pixelation and banding. In other words, the transitions between dark and darker are blotchy with bands and blocks instead of a nice smooth transition.I think I'll take this digital set top box back and stay with analog cable until I make the switch to satellite. I hope satellite service is better than digital cable.... it's worth a try.
The other thing that really bugs me is the slow channel changing. With my analog cable I can surf through several channels very quickly. With the digital set top box it takes forever to change channels as each channel takes a second to display. (A second is a very long time when you're used to channel hopping in milli-seconds).
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