[TelstraClear] TCL cable picture quality questions

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lchiu7

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#8485 3-Jul-2006 19:04

I have TCL digital cable. I was just wondering if my viewing experience mirrors other users w.r.t. quality of the picture. To put this into perspective I watch TCL cable on a 56" JVC D-ILA HD set so it tends to magnify the effects of SD television. But all channels are put through the same process so that's a levelling aspect.

I am finding that TV1 is about as good as you might expect from a compressed MPEG2 signal using network news as the guide (since it's live TV). A bit clearer than the analogue signal on the cable but lacking a bit in detail. However TV3 I find quite soft and I don't know why since my understanding TV1, TV2 and TV3 are provided as direct feeds to TCL to pass on. Maybe they compress TV3 more? As for the satellite channels, most are pretty poor with the best channel for me being DW television. World TV is terrible but I suspect it's the source rather than TCL's fault. Living, Cooking, Discovery etc are also pretty soft.

Interested to know what others are experiencing

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sbiddle

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#40409 3-Jul-2006 21:33

You've had digital cable for a while haven't you? Have you noticed 3 change at all? I don't have digital here but my sister does and when I was watching 3 on it a couple of weeks ago it certainly looked very different to 3 did when I first watched it on digital cable and certainly looked very different to 3 over analogue FTA. I'm not quite sure how to describe it but maybe softer is the right word!

lchiu7

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#40491 5-Jul-2006 11:30

I had a chat to a friend in TCL who advised me the following. TV1 comes from Optus B so the quality is whatever TV1 send up to the dish. So it's usually reasonable. TV3 however is grabbed from the air. That means the quality is no better than what you and I would get with an aerial but then they have to apply some filtering to the signal to remove RF noise etc. and then MPEG2 compression. So that's why it's much softer than TV1. I feel like checking out my aerial to see if I can get a better OTA signal myself :-(

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ljbade

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#40502 5-Jul-2006 14:01

when freeview is finsihed TCL shall be able to get tv3 and prime via satalite which should improve quality.
but the sky channels should have better quality as they are already on sat
maybe sky purposefully turns down the quality of their channels on saturn to make ppl get sky intead of saturn?

lchiu7

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#40570 6-Jul-2006 09:22

I wonder why TCL has to get a feed from OTA for TV3 when I suspect the TV3 feed that Sky gets is probably direct? Also my sources tell me that TCL just retransmit Sky - they don't recompress the signal. Guess it depends on what Sky provides them?

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ljbade

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#40573 6-Jul-2006 09:39

The reason TCL get TV3 OTA is because they have all there equipment in Wellington, and TV3 being a small channel probably doesn't have a digital feed to Wellington. Sky on the other hand is based in Auckland so it would be easy for them to get a digital feed from TV3's head office.

lchiu7

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#40583 6-Jul-2006 11:34

TV3 has to get their signal across the country over the BCL network. Surely tapping into the feed that TV3 sends to BCL so it can be transmitted in Wellington from Kaukau is a lot cleaner than grabbing an OTA signal

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ljbade

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#40595 6-Jul-2006 16:35

Maybe TCL thinks it is not worth the effort, as many of there customers don't care about the quality.

lurker

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#40613 6-Jul-2006 23:52

Ichiu7, I concur with your experience regarding image quality. I did comment about this in a post I made earlier as I'm new to digital TV myself and was very surprised at how bad some of the channels appear. If digital TV has always been like this then more fool me for not doing my research before signing up I guess.

lchiu7

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#40620 7-Jul-2006 09:42

Well you know you can watch the FTA channels over analogue by just plugging the cable into your TV and tuning into them. I upgraded to digital from analogue mainly because there are channels on digital that are not on analogue. I have both in the house - one digital STB and one analogue in my bedroom. One advantage that TCL has is that the second box if analogue is only $9.95/month whereas Sky charge $29 I think for the second box.

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