Helaine and I watched the NFL all day. The Eagles debacle was tough to take. We still watched. This is our Sunday ritual.
Football viewing takes place upstairs in the loft where we’ve got a comfy sofa and a wall mounted TV. I’m not sure how large the set is, but it’s the biggest we’ve ever owned. Nowadays it’s considered mid-sized!
Bigger sets really let you see the action. They also let you see the shortcoming of your TV reception.
Here’s the hidden secret of HDTV: What you get from cable or satellite is a shadow of what you could or should get!
In order to pack more signals onto a satellite transponder or coaxial cable each is compressed. Picture details are sacrificed to preserve bandwidth.
Each channel is individually compressed. Not all channels are equal.
I expected AT&T U-Verse to be less compressed than Comcast, my provider back in Connecticut. After all, AT&T’s run from the central office to my house is over a dedicated strand of fiber. The available bandwidth is huge.
Compression artifacts are most easily seen in areas of high contrast. When a football player runs down the field, his body is surrounded by these misshapen and miscolored pixels. And the bigger the screen the more noticeable they are.
You can see some of the distortion in the Fox Sports logo at the top of this entry. The edges should be clean. They are not.
I’m wondering whether AT&T U-Verse actually knows their own product. They should be able to sell a superior video service. Their infrastructure is much more robust than cable or satellite. And yet their video product doesn’t seem better to me.
Make no mistake. I’m not unhappy with U-Verse, their DVR alone is worth the price of admission, but I know it could be so much better at virtually no additional cost.
Sometimes you just shake your head.
