Chorus digital picture quality

stylers

Hello All,

just helped a guy add another chorus digital box to his house, off the one antenna. So he is now feeding two boxes from the dish. He also bought himself one of those slimline tube widescreen telly's ( a samsung). When i checked everything, I was getting about 65 - 70 % signal and full quality reading, and 24dB C/N on the two boxes. But I thought the picture quality was woeful, with lots of compression artefacts visible, even on the RTE's and TV3, TG4. The big screen didnt help either. He couldnt see any difference from before, and was perfectly happy, but I wasn't, even though i could see nothing really wrong. Is the chorus picture quality just crap to begin with ?. I dont see many chorus installs meself, but theres no way i would pay for that..

btw, this is in westmeath area

Owen.

zilog_jones

Yes, Chorus digital MMDS usually looks pretty cat - even on Chorus analogue cable we get pretty bad compression artefacts on some channels!

Also, does the TV (I assume CRT since you said "tube") have some sort of 100Hz and/or "progressive scan" function? This kind of processing can often amplify artefacts, or even make its own artefacts on top of everything. Deinterlacing like this usually looks shyte, especially with any high-motion video (sports or whatever).

watty

That is a HD ready set so by defualt it may be doing all kinds of silly things.

stylers

Yea, it was a brand new HD ready set. I turned off the DNR and set sharpness to full but it still looked rubbish. But that doesent surprise me anyway. I'm usually horrified when i see the pictures on most modern sets :eek:
If i get near it again, I'll have a look at it on an ordinary portable. pity i didnt have one with me at the time. But even so, the pictures are probably fairly crap from the box anyway.. even with a decent signal.

thanks,

Owen.

I feel there's nothing better than a good old CRT on an analogue broadcast for good picture quality. Digital TV is way too compressed in most cases and LCDs just enhance the visibility of the artifacts caused by heavy MPEG-2 compression.

I'd say a HD television viewing 625 line material would be the same because of the need to resize the image to 720 or 1080 lines. But I've no experience, its just a suspicion.

zilog_jones

stylers wrote:

I ... set sharpness to full but it still looked rubbish.

Erm, that probably isn't helping. Too much sharpening would probably amplify the crappy blocking. With analogue stuff I find having sharpness about half to 3/4 the way up best, though I'd say results can differ a lot with different sets.