Sky NTL Pic Quality

kco3d

I've read in a few posts recently that people find the picture quality of Sky channels on NTL viewed on an lcd tv better than directly from Sky through dish.....I've seen both and have to say the NTL digital picture does look better...

My question is how?? Do NTL not receive the digital sky channels the same way a residential sky digital subscriber does (i.e dish, digibox) and then just relay the signal over their cable network?

TheBigLebowski

From my experience, NTL's picture isn't a patch on sky on any TV...

Mossy Monk

kco3d wrote:

I've read in a few posts recently that people find the picture quality of Sky channels on NTL viewed on an lcd tv better than directly from Sky through dish.....I've seen both and have to say the NTL digital picture does look better...

I would have to disagree.

mustang68

I would also disagree, I think ntl introduce artifacts with their compression, but I haven't seen it on the main sky channels on sky.

JDxtra

With Sky you can try and improve the quality yourself to a small extent (re-align dish, better cabling etc). With NTL - you are stuck with what you get.

NTL get a feed of the main channels from the old NTL distribution centre in the UK (or whatever the office is called now).

RTE have fibre going direct to NTL for their feeds.

TV3/TG4 appear to be sourced from analog TV on NTL.

John1000

kco3d wrote:

I've read in a few posts recently that people find the picture quality of Sky channels on NTL viewed on an lcd tv better than directly from Sky through dish.....I've seen both and have to say the NTL digital picture does look better...

My question is how?? Do NTL not receive the digital sky channels the same way a residential sky digital subscriber does (i.e dish, digibox) and then just relay the signal over their cable network?

The quality of digital transmissions can be varied. You can have a few
higher picture quality channels or a lot of lower picture quality channels for the same bandwidth.

I don;t know about ntl but I find the RTE piture quality on chorus digital is worse than that received through a aerial on the roof. (harder to read
the score in matches etc...)

Mossy Monk

JDxtra wrote:

RTE have fibre going direct to NTL for their feeds.

TV3/TG4 appear to be sourced from analog TV on NTL.

Would TV3 and TG4 not be sourced directly from RTÉ. The reason I ask is that RTÉ uplink both TV3 and TG4 onto Sky Digital.

watty

If NTL resample to lower bandwidth, the poorer softer picture may look better on some LCDs.

In general only an HD LCD gives decent ordinary TV pictures. LCD and plasma are a fixed number of dots. Satellite channels can be over FIVE different resolutions. Only a resolution that is exactly the same as the LCD dots has any chance of looking decent.

Also the Analogue to Digital conversion in Many LCDs leaves a lot to be desired.

Any Satellite channels is generally higher quality that the same channel on Cable, especially analogue cable. But some LCDs respond badly to a sharper picture.