NFL Playoffs in HDTV (1 Viewer)

[Lance_R]

The ABC broadcast was excellent in HD today!
Even the Visa Sky Cam was in HD.

Next they must work on the blimp.

Go Titans!

 

[Patrick Sun]

Yah, having HDTV for the NFL playoffs makes it all worth it. ABC's coverage was pretty good (except for the start of the Panther/Cowboy game where the audio for the commentators wasn't working for a little bit).

 

[Grant B]

The Indy broadcast on CBS is A++++!!!

Fox comes in as a D-

 

[MattBu]

I'll give the Fox Broadcast a B-. The CBS broadcast gets a B+. The PQ of the GAME itself was nice, A- for sure (Nothing can touch the quality of the ESPN NFL games in my book. The CBS had WAY too many SD shots and they looked horrific.

 

[Bill MacAdoo]

I agree. I actually prefer the standard definition broadcast...

I'd put CBS in first place, ABC a close second, and Fox a very distant 8th.

 

[Lance_R]

I would rank them

ABC -- A
All of their cameras except the Blimp are HD
CBS -- B+
Great clarity, the indoor games just don't seem to look as good, although the Sugar bowl look great on ABC
Fox -- C-
They need to get their act in gear and get all of their sports in all HD cameras; I would love to some HD Nascar.

Lance

 

[Grant B]

They don't have any, do they?
As far as I know there digital channels are all 480 'enhanced'

Are all affiliates the same resolution? The cbs looked much better on my tv so I assumed abc was at a lower resolution.
Doesnt seem to make sense but who knows?

 

[ThomasC]

CBS is 1080i, ABC is 780p, FOX doesn't film anything in HDTV yet, it's 480p.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I believe Fox's NFL games are even worse -- 480i cameras upconverted to 480p.

I do not know how anyone with a HD television could think Fox's NFL games looked anywhere near as good as ABC or CBS. My wife walked into the room during the Fox "crap-screen" game on Sunday, and without any prompting from me, immediately said "this game isn't in HD, is it?". And she's not a football fan.

Personally, I thought the CBS game looked slightly better than ABC's two Saturday games on my setup (all HD gets converted to 1080i, including ABC/ESPN's 720p). However, I was very pleased with both networks' efforts.

 

[Keith Mickunas]

Has anyone else noticed the one incredibly bad camera CBS has used on the sidelines in a few games this season? It's widescreen, but perhaps its an SD camera being upconverted, I don't know, but it looks far worse than normal SD. Bright whites often break up into a rainbow with this camera. I remember seeing it in one of the Chiefs' games late in the season, and then I saw it another Chiefs' game, and I saw it in the playoffs. Each time I've noticed it it's been on the sidelines.

 

[Hanson]

Maybe it's because I have a 1080i native set and the 720p is upconverted, but for my money, CBS is head and shoulders above ABC in terms of PQ. Don't get me wrong, ABC looks really good -- better than DVD quality for sure -- but the CBS feed is crisper and more detailed (which may be releated to conversion artifacts). The biggest difference, however, is that the color on CBS is just eye-poppingly gorgeous -- it gives the picture a 3-dimensional quality that imparts that much touted "looking out of a window" experience.

I find that the Fox widescreen stuff is better than my cable by a lot, but 4:3 the uprezzed stuff just looks terrible.

BTW, I don't know what the deal is with the uprezzing. I have seen some CBS uprezzed games (they only did one HD game a week) that looked really crappy. OTOH, Survivor was consistenly gorgeous even though that was uprezzed video as well. In fact, when I first started watching the Survivor via MyHD, I thought it was shot in hi-def. The mind boggles thinking about what it would look like shot with HD cameras.

 

[WillieM]

CBS and Sony have teamed-up for all the playoff games and the Superbowl for the HD presentations. Sweet!

Sunday's game on AstroTurf looked like a Nintendo game.

 

[Hanson]

Yeah. Really noisy for some reason and noisier than the other SD cameras. Maybe it's that one camera?

I'm constantly pointing out to others room when the camera is hi-def and when it isn't.

 

[Ron Reda]

Unfortunately, I don't have an antenna on my house, so I don't get any of the playoff games in HD. I really wish they would show them on the DirecTV "70-series" channels like they did during the regular season with the "Game of the Week".