Adventures in HD

Now that I have a HDTV (LC-46D82U) and HD programming via Shaw, I've noticed that the quality of the HD broadcast varies from channel to channel and in some cases program to program.

For example, not all HD programs are created equally.  The CTV National News for example is very clear and detailed, but most ABC, CBS and Fox programming in HD shows evidence of image artifacts due to compression.  I'm not talking about a little noise either... it's enough noise to be distracting.

As I understand it the reason for this is that the cable providers (Shaw, Rogers, Bell, etc...) have a fixed amount of bandwidth available to them for sending signals to their subscribers.  To maximize their profitability they allocate less bandwidth to each channel in order to provide more channels to subscribers and they must then apply more compression to the signal and this can lead to compression artifacts as seen above.

This is the biggest challenge I see the adoption of HD having in the marketplace.  The improved visual quality of programming is just not that noticeable for a significant portion of HD programming currently available. 

For example, I'll be able to flip back and forth between a HD version of a program and a standard definition (SD) version of a program on my TV and in some cases the only difference I'll notice is the addition of black bars as a result of the change from wide screen to 4:3 screen.  That doesn't exactly make a great selling feature.

For this reason, I've been looking at options for providing my TV with a better quality video source, such as an HD DVD player (BlueRay) or playing HD video files from my PC.  More on that on my next post...