Satellite or CATV?

Bills fans... I like the turnaround Drew Bledsoe has made and I think he will take them to the playoffs! Also, if Doug Flutie starts that Tennessee game, the Homerun Throwback would have been just a footnote to a Bills victory, and I am a diehard Titans fan!

Elsewhere, thanks for all the comments on DirecTV.

I understand your situation, I was in an identical situation a few months ago and this is what I did -

I had the Time-Warner "Analog" cable replaced with Dish Network in my house. I was disgusted with the quality of cable and their frequent underhanded price increases. In a previous house I had a full size (10') satellite dish which was an enormous improvement over cable.

Much to my surprise I found that the quality of the signal from Dish Network was not significantly better than the analog signal I received from my cable provider. Even the installers who came repeatedly to "fix" the Dish Network signal agreed and eventually gave up. The quality was apparent in all the televisions in my house but most obvious on the 100" Stewart screen/ CRT projector I own. The problems are typically greater degree of color bleed, loss of sharpness, signal strength, black level etc.

I am still living with the satellite system because of the variety of programming it offers. Just few of the channels make it worthwhile to go the Dish Network route such as National Geographic Channel, Worldlink TV, History Channel etc. but don't expect a tremendous improvement in quality. I, for one, did not get it.

FYI, I have four separate receivers (including a PVR) wired with high quality Belden video cable. There are no splitters in my system.

IMO, yes Dishnetwork is better than cable but a full size satellite dish beats the pants off both. I should know, I have had all three at one time or another.

Remember to fine tune your system using the largest tv you have in the house because it magnifies every nuance of the video signal.

Regards,

Erider

Going back to Bflo. for the Ptriots game (from DC). I'm from Williamsville, and my parents (and our little family business!) are still there. Beef on weck, here I come!

--Brian

Brian-
DUDE! Beef on Weck - you make me homesick!

Blueswan-
Good comments on Bledsoe. I'm thinking the Bills may be the real deal this year. They were written off early, but I think people are sitting up and taking notice. Living in Phila. with Eagles fans, football has a weird take here. I mean, all the pundits are calling them the best team in the NFC. Look at their division. God, that game with the Gints (Giants) last night was not worthy of MNF. It was sloppy. More like a street fight. I'll put the Bills on a good day up against anything the NFC can throw at them. AFC baby!

One issue that I've yet to see addressed in this thread is compression. Dish and DirecTV may not, in some cases, look as good as a CATV signal if the level of compression is high for the digital signal and the analog/CATV signal is of high quality and you're close to the source. I recently upgraded to a high-def RPTV and I use Dish network. The signal is nowhere near "DVD quality" as many of the DSS salesman will pitch. You may not have the interference and ghosting issues w/ a digital signal like w/ CATV, but the compression makes for a poor signal when the image is viewed on high resolutions TVs (and more so if the set is large -- kind of like zooming/blowing up a compressed digital camera picture). Just my 2 cents. Many others in other home theater forums say the same. I didn't know this when I got Dish. I fell for the DSS "all digital" rhetoric. The issues here are similar to the old "analog vs. digital" audio debates (trade off lack of noise vs. compression issues).