Am I the only person who thinks that Digital TV quality is horrid?

My girlfriend had cable and watching any channel I could see squares on the screen like when you compress a JPEG too much. Watching football you can see flickering squares around the players and the ball. The pitch would be shown in only 3 shades of green like on a bad football computer game and you can see the join where the different shades join. The grass would have not detail on it untill the camera stops in the same place for 4 or 5 seconds.

For people who know about how it works, it actually uses information from the previous picture to create the next image. So when you see a football moving through the air, the image of the football is most probably about 5 frames old but its just moved it slightly and chaged the size and position.

 

I remember watching a travel program and there was a shot of of a field as they went past on a train, and the picture was just filled with large squares of different shades of green.

 

Now she has Sky its better but not by much.

 

Does any one else notice the terrible quality of Digital TV?

 

Stuart

I had this with my Pace box at my old house:rolleyes:

 

My new one is Panasonic it is much much faster through the menu,and have not seen any of those faults on it.

Yep. It is possible to get very good digital pictures, but it's quite rare. When Sky digital was introduced, I already had a 'DBox' which I used to get various digital channels from around Europe. The picture quality was pretty good then, so I decided to "upgrade" to Sky Digital.

 

Sky decided to squeeze a lot more channels into the available bandwidth, so their pictures were worse, but I seem to have got fairly used to them over the years. I even watch most of my TV via TiVo, which re-digitises the Sky picture, so introduces even more digital artifacts. Sadly, most people don't notice the poorer picture, and those that do often get used to it after a while, so those who hate it are ignored. :(

 

I find it really obvious for sports still. On the football, you can see the blades of grass until the camera pans, and then it's just a constant block of green. And when the golf ball is landing on the green, it ends up as a sort of white streak. :rolleyes:

 

Obviously a big TV does show the problems a lot more though.

Yes.

 

You need to set the sharpness setting on your TV to the lowest possible. Your TV is actually sharpening up the edges between artifacts... those colour squares that appear through lossy compression.

 

Ultimately you're right tho... we're being sold digital TV as the best thing since sliced alcohol filled dairy-milk, and the only think really better about it is the stability of the picture. And number of channels that can fit in the same bandwidth, I s'pose. There's no graceful degredation like analogue TV - digital either works or craps out really bad.

 

Just to add to the problem... the service providers can actually alter the bitrate for a channel as they please. Digital channels are normally broadcast as a bunch on a single transponder (same frequency, digitally streamed together) so the one that requires the biggest bandwidth, eg a primary channel like BBC1 will normally get the best quality.

 

As for what Sky are up to... there's only a limited amount of transponders... the reason there's so many soddin' channels can only be because each has a horribly limited bitrate.

I notice it because I dont have Sky and dont get used to it. I have noticed it on DVDs too especially with the colour black but its no where near as bad as Digial TV. The longer fimes have more compression and are worse.

 

Strange thing is, I watched Sky One, a main stream channel and the compression was very noticable. I then watched Back To The Future on the Sci-Fi channel and it was good quality.

 

 

Stuart

Originally posted by SRRAE

I notice it because I dont have Sky and dont get used to it. I have noticed it on DVDs too especially with the colour black but its no where near as bad as Digial TV. The longer fimes have more compression and are worse.

On DVDs, if you're talking about blocks, then that's likely to be a compression problem (although I can't remember seeing that). If it's more of a problem with bands of slightly different colours rather than a smooth transition, that's more likely to be a limitation of the DVD player.

 

The bandwidth available on a DVD is massively more than that on a digital TV channel though.

Watch a few DVDs squashed onto CDs with divx, then everything else looks loverly. Or drink more beer until your focus is off :) Or get a really small telly! ;)

 

Or... "switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead". Whatever happened to Why Don't You? Oh, yeah, it was crap.

Stuart -

 

You're absolutely right. I think the quality is really terrible, though I find it depends on the broadcast. For example, films are often really good, whereas live events like the football gives shocking artefacts. True that football doesn't lend itself to be easily encoded but it's still really bad!

 

It's one of the reasons I resisted moving to a digital box for a long while but my provider was squirting digitally encoded feeds down the line anyway (put through a DAC process of course) - checkmate.

 

Makes me fume! Talk about quantity over quality! In fact, don't - you'll get me started on TV programming!

 

:mad: Harrumph!

Russ.

agreed Digi tv is crap, they expect us to pay for this advanced technology and its no better than SVCD, im sticking with me trusty ntl analog box for as long as i can, ive downloaded tv episodes that have been better quality ffs

I download some Simpsons (Some? about 300 episodes ;)) from Kazaa and some are a lot better than Digital quality.

 

And the government want to turn off all the analogue transmitters by 2005. Ha. Like that will happen now.

 

What doesn’t help the bandwidth now are channels which run that 1 hour channels. So they run what was on an hour ago. :confused:

 

Stuart

I know what you mean Stu about the 'pixellation' on Sky Digital, ours does it quite a bit.

I also have digital terrestrial which is just as bad. :rolleyes:

Dave