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#16
01-22-2006, 06:39 PM
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#17
01-22-2006, 10:57 PM
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This whole thing makes me want to climb the mountain and try to put an antenna up there and run old open ladder lead wire down the hill
 In all seriousness, I appreciate the ideas, and I will have a LONG chat with the tech at Comcast this week  But back to the antenna-on-the-mountain, it might not be too far-fetched. That's what they did in the 40s and 50s in Bel air, Beverly Hills and Brentwood where there wasn't any TV air signal. A group of homeowners would pool together and have a tower installed, then run 1000' or more of open ladder lead to each house. In my case though, it's a straight 500' foot granite cliff to the Northeast of us. The nice thing is that the summer sun never hits us! It's in the shade. But in the winter, the sun is up all day  Charles Last edited by Kaye-Halbert TV; 01-22-2006 at 11:03 PM.
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#18
01-23-2006, 12:31 PM
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I would agree with the comments that weak signal could be a cause. We had a similar problem, and on the second trip out by the cable co. techs, they decided that my feed from the street was no good.
They shot a new line in from the box (literally "shot" it under my driveway!) and now all is well. When they come out they will be able to measure all the parameters of the signal, there's no guesswork involved...
__________________
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you wanted.
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#19
01-23-2006, 01:11 PM
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I just got a 50" plasma HDTV and it took the cable (Comcast) company 4 trips to figure out why I couldn't get all the HD channels. After many techs, supervisors, cable boxes, and tests, they determined the cable from the amplifier to the house must be replaced. They have a temporary set up now and it works great. The HD channels are STUNNING! Saw my first NFL game last night in HD from Fox and CBS...WOW! I have the same lip synch issue with NBC Local channel 4 during their news broadcast. But only with them. And only during the news. The NBC HD programs seem to work fine. Channel 9 (the only newstation in the area broadcasting in HD) is so clear it is almost frightening! You can see peachfuzz on the anchorwoman's face.
HBO HD and Discovery HD are awesome as well....
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#20
01-23-2006, 01:34 PM
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Whaht Kaye-H described definitely sounds like coding artifacts (blocking on scene changes and motion), not weak signal. In weak signal problems, the blocks will have violently wrong color, whereas, when the coder is bit-starved, the blocks are due to the high frequencies being attenuated and mainly the average color over the block being sent. Two fixes: more bandwidth allocated to the program (ha ha), or sit further back from the screen. High quality analog cable can be better than bit starved digital, but I got fed up with the low-quality analog (streaky noise, levels unbalanced resulting in cross-modulation) on my cable system years ago, and switched to satellite (Dish Network). I have watched the Dish artifacts change over the years as they get new coders, and while the nature of the artifacts has changed, the general level has not. Dish used to have a lot of "mosquito noise", e.g., on close examination, the details looked "twitchy"; now its just looks smeary, and there's some weird motion artifacts on the local channels where the movement of the low-contrast shading and color within an area seems to lag the movement of the area boundaries. I'm guessing that the newer coders made the pictures better, so they cut back the bit rate to the "tolerable" point again.
On the other hand, the HD pix in over-the-air programs can be stunning and artifact free. Some stations are experimenting with cutting the HD bit rate to carry simulcasts of news and weather, with varying success. The local ABC station (note: the HD is in 1280x720P) seems to get away with adding two SD channels very well. The NBC station (HD is 1920x1080I) seems to also. The PBS station, though, shows some coding artifacts on scene changes. I think it depends on how new and well-tweaked your coder is.
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#21
01-23-2006, 06:43 PM
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It could be any of the problems mentioned,weak signal,bad converter.It's not your set.The mosaic patter is what's typically called "blocking".It's the digital signal.I had similar problems with my cable co. and box.The root problem was signal strength.It would vary from day to day.Got so bad,I decided to dump the box and HD...wasn't anything worthwhile to watch...
Duane
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#22
01-23-2006, 10:41 PM
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I would have to agree with RCA2000, my bank installed a new Plasma TV for customers to watch news on wall while waiting to be helped. The TV was in some goofy, blurred mode showing pixels. Overall picture definition was poor, lacking clarity, detail, quality, contrast or color quality of a good CRT TV set. We have daily RCA watcher, late 80s, 20" CRT(black matrix), picture is still far superior to plasma I saw. What a scam. This crap is supposed to replace CRT TVs?? I thought was watching a large screen LCD TV at first due to poor picture quality. Even with best possible signal, didn't see anything to write home about.
 
Last edited by vintagecollect; 01-23-2006 at 10:57 PM. Reason: .
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