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What a Shock

What a surprise. I bought the Sony 300 Blu-Ray player yesterday and watched 5th Element. For two years I thought I was watching HD on Time Warner's Cable feed. I wasn't. What I was watching was something a bit better than DVD, but certainly nowhere near what I saw last night.

My question is this: Why are cable companies allowed to call their signals HD when, in fact, they are compressing them (or something) to the point that it's not really that much better than DVD-quality?

Shane Martin

Re: What a Shock

It's really a limitation of the source. OTA and HD signals have inherent issues that disc based formats do not.

My HD signal from Cable is rather good. Much much better than a satellite dish but disc based HD is still better due to these inherent issues.

PaulDA

Re: What a Shock

It also varies with programming. Journeyman in HD looked like a high quality SD DVD with my setup, but sports, Pushing Daisies and Torchwood in HD look far better than any SD DVD I've seen (though not quite up to the level of the few HD DVDs I've watched so far).

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes time, and it annoys the pig.

JonZ

Re: What a Shock

Yea, some of the premium movie channels and sports broadcasts look pretty close to HD discs while TNT for example, look mediocre.