More DirectTV questions. (1 Viewer)

[Chris*C]

I currently have Adelphia Digital Cable and I am not happy with the picture quality at all especially on my big screen HDTV.
If I switch to a dish how much better will the picture quality be?
Secondly, I live in a townhouse with tv's on all 3 levels, how do they run wiring from the dish to all these levels? Are they drilling holes all over my house with wiring running all over the place?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Robert_J]

Picture quality on cable varies widely and what is acceptable to me may not be acceptable to you. That being said, I find DirecTV's standard def picture acceptable. I've tweaked my TV with VE but I still see compression artifacts. It's much better than my local digital cable which had problems with macro blocking and video drop outs.

It depends on how your current cable system is wired. If you have a single coax coming into your house and there are splitters buried in the wall then it will be expensive to use that wiring. Sat equipment was not designed to work with splitters and you will have to use a stacker. If you want to add HD, then it will be impossible to use splitters. If all of your coax cables run to a common location, that's much better. Any additional equipment can be added there. If you give me a better description of how everything is currently wired, then I can go into more detail.

-Robert

 

[Davin D]

Robert,

I use DirecTV on my 55 inch HDTV. The picture for the most part looks good. I haven't had Digital Cable before so it's hard to do a comparison. I do notice some compression artifacts on certain channels. I think (I can't verify it) that they are compressing certain channels more than others. I notice it a lot on HGTV.

As for the cable runs, you need a dedicated line from the SAT (or multiswitch) for each DirecTV receiver. If there are 3 separate cables in your house running to the outside, you will be ok, otherwise there will be a lot of cabling to run.