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Best TV reception quality?

[Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 20
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in TV and Home Entertainment Technology #1
What gives the best picture/sound quality, analogue terrestrial, dig terrestrial, analogue sat or dig sat or cable? I want to upgrade from analogue terrestrial/sat, but I’ve heard analogue terrestrial is still king for quality. I watched some sport on Eurosport at the w/end on analogue sat, then watched the same on BBC analogue terrestrial. BBC was miles better quality. Advice pls.

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    GaryBGaryB Posts: 4,259
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    #2
    That really depends on what you consider "best". Digital normally gives a cleaner picture than analogue but once you get a bit of movement in the picture, digital MPEG artefacts starts to show and it can look pretty awful. My personal preference is still for analogue terrestrial.
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    [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 930
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    #3
    Analog will usually be better, providing you get a good enough reception.

    AS mpeg 2 is a 'lossy' technology by design then it will always vary considerably in quality. But it definatley has the potential as a well mastered DVD is as good as you'll get on a UK TV.
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    [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 225
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    #4
    Had Sky Digital for about 6 months now. Also have very good analogue terrestrial. This is very good, since it comes from a local transmitter - just 2 miles away (and we can see the top of the transmitter).

    So which is best?
    Not as easy as you think.
    Perfect digital (sky) is a bit better than "perfect" analogue terrestrial. But not all sky channels are this good. BBC News 24, Sky News, BBC Parliament, on sky have a sharper, cleaner image, and there is virtually no sign of "digital side effects". At the other end of the scale, you will see some content of BBC2 (on sky) which has got obvious digital side effects. Blocky effects around the edges of stuff, and on flat area's you can see lots of pixel blocks shifting around.

    So, perfect digital (sky) is better than perfect analogue terrestrial. But poor quality digital channels (on sky) do have "problems", and a very good analogue terrestrial signal would be better than those.
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    steven123steven123 Posts: 3,245
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    #5
    i have digital cable (NTL) and i find the reception to be a good improvement over the analogue cable as reception was a little fuzzy on anologue and was quite prone to interference on anologue cable but even on digital it has its problems although picture is generally very clear and sharp sometimes it can look quite low resolution and on very fast scenes can suffer from some very nasty blocking effects which can make the picture seem less natural than a good quality anologue signal.

    Although generally i would say that the picture quality on digital TV is pretty good i would also say that it is no where near the excellent quality of a DVD movie and i think that digital TV still has plenty of room for improvement in terms of picture quality
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    [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 930
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    #6
    Steven123 pretty much sums it all up. Good post.
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    [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 225
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    #7
    Yes, DVD is better than Digital SKY, although by how much depends on which channel you are looking at.

    Also, old tv content on Sky will still have analogue style effects - this is in the original content, so it doesn't matter how it's transmitted, you still see it. This is also true of DVD. Very old content with faults on the original master will reproduce on screen, even with a dvd release. In some dvd example's, the boffins have "re-edited" the original master on digital editors, so the only "faults" are that of the actual film shot, where as a straight dvd release takes analogue film, which was previously edited in analogue, and just master to dvd.
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    [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 105
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    #8
    Some channels on Sky broadcast a resolution of 352x576 - terrible!!! VCD quality...

    DTT is better than Sky's broadcast of C4 / ITV etc - much clearer, although I've noticed more artifacts on ITV recently since ITV news joined the mux.

    Gaz
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    [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 4,170
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    #9
    No easy answer, but on balance I would go for digital satellite.

    With the newer boxes, pictures which are transmitted properly with decent bandwidth are outstanding on RGB, although poorly transmitted pictures are still poor!

    Colours are cleaner, there is no herringbone or ghosting in sight, edges are clean - pretty good all round.

    And with new technology it will get better still.

    But watching some old BBC material which was shot on 1" tape, Betacam SP or film, is a revelation - the colour and detail is superb - eg "Open All Hours", "Dad's Army" etc etc.

    And the sound is pretty good too with at least the potential for 5.1 Dolby in the future - although at the moment only Sky plus boxes can get it.

    Freeview is OK, but very limited in its future development until more analogue space is released and allocated to it - and that's years away.

    Analogue is on the way out I'm afraid...
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