Recent episode with Comcast made me pick up the pen and write a line or two. I'll keep it short, I'll promise. The thing was, a week or so ago, during a MLB game from HD-channel I noticed that the screen went "funny" about once a second, making it quite irritating to watch. As I paused the image, I noticed that every second or so, the resolution dropped to something like 240x160, and on my 92" screen, that's not fun to watch.
I picked up my phone, and called Comcast service number. Lady on phone was nice and friendly, and they promised to send technician to look at the picture in next 4 hours. About 1.5 hours later, technician arrived, eyeballed the picture for some seconds, and told me it's feature, not problem. The thing is, as Comcast has the advertisements "More More More", which means more HD channels. What they didn't include in the advertisement, is that they forced more channels to existing bandwidth, requiring them to apply extra compression to the HD channels. This is the reason why quite many of the HD channels are more or less bad. The technician was also friendly, but as he said, there's nothing he can do about the picture quality.
To make comparison, I took few pictures with my camera. Not the best way to document TV picture quality, but good enough for this. I tried to be fair and honest, but I must say, the bad frames really look bad, no matter how you look at them. All the pictures are without ANY modification. As I downloaded the images from the camera, I only resized them for better internet size, and then I cropped the zoom to get better view of the picture quality. Also all the zooms were done to same level, so the pictures should be comparable. If you think there's something I should make different, please make suggestion and I'll see if I can do better comparison.
Here is picture when the picture is panning, which is difficult for the MPEG compression. First one is the orginal without any modification, second one is zoom of the same image.
Not the prettiest, but panning picture with that much details, it's tough even for HD channel.
To compare againt non-compressed channel, I took picture at somewhat similar condition on another HD channel, while camera was panning. Result was much better, although the picture is not super crisp. Here's the image, with respective zoom.
Then I froze a bad frame, which occurred about once a second. Result is quite awful to watch. I must admit, it doesn't look this bad when watching live image, as it occurs few frames now and then. But it's irritating, as the screen flashes during the bad frames. Well, here's the pictures:
This is HD channel. Believe or not.
Next one is another shot from good non-compressed channel, with not that much panning.
Picture looks quite good, even the zoom is quite sharp.
Then similar one from the bad channel, but from a good frame.
Quite good, although not as sharp as the non-compressed channel. You cannot read the name for the player from this picture.
Last one from the bad channel, with bad frame.
So this is the HD we get now :(
As a conclusion, I don't like bad picture quality. But if I had 2 options, first one is lot of HD channels with bad quality, and second one is few HD channels with good quality, would be tough call actually. Depends on what channels I could keep and what I would lose. If I could select 5 favourite HD channels with perfect quality, that'd be it. But some reason Comcast want to squeeze in some home improvement channels on HD, which takes out the bandwidth from channels which really would benefit from the high bitrate, especially sports.
Also I must say, currently what I know about TV providers, Comcast is still the lesser evil. I was thinking about switching over to DirecTV, but!!! As I studied it before jumping their wagon, I found out that the small print of the contract says that if you sign up for HD packet, you automatically subscribe to 2 year contract. Many people told that no-one mentioned this to them. At this point, I don't want 2 year contract with TV company. I don't know how Dish is doing, so it looks like currently I will stay with Comcast. To be fair, it's still good.
Well...it's good, but it could be great. Unfortunately the competition pushed them to add more HD channels, and the quality takes the hit. I'm sure many people don't notice the difference, not everyone has 92" screen. I do, and I notice. I'm planning to investigate FIOS, as that would provide also fast internet. Will see, but would be nice to have good HD channels.
Disclaimer for copyright holders, I have send email to respective channels asking their permission to keep these pictures here. I hope people will give Comcast call, and ask them to get the quality back by removing extra channels. I want to make people aware of the quality Comcast is delivering. That's the main reason I put these pictures here, not to distribute illegal material. If you are copyright holder of any of the images on this page, and want me to remove those, you can write me email and I will remove those pictures. My email-address is tero.koti@patana.fi
