Fake HD

MSNBC switched over to high-def today, although it won’t show up on all the cable systems until early August. It kicked in with my provider, Century Cable, three days ago. So I tuned in this afternoon — channel 723 instead of the regular analog channel 23 — to see how good it looked, and it looked like hell. All pixellated and degraded — basically an analog image with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio. I know what the real thing looks like. This is crap.

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26 thoughts on “Fake HD”

  1. Half my “HD” channels are just like that. They compress the shit out of them. Fucking cable company rat bastards. Upgrading to blu ray last year just made the suffering worse by showing me how good an image can look.

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  4. can someone explain why it is taking them so long to make this switch? especially for single camera shows like maddow or countdown? whats the holdup? money? fricking local channels have been HD for ages.

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  7. Not all HD is created equal because most HD isn’t actually HD.

    HD by definition is 1920 x 1080. However, 1280 x 720 is also being marketed as “HD” simply because it’s larger than SD 640 x 480.

    Thing is, the 720 signal, which is I think the bulk of TV, I think you’re getting 720i not 720p. So you’re getting double-fucked. 720i on a 1080p set is like showing 16mm on a Cinerama screen.

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  8. My Comcast HD box says it 1080i when I’m on an HD channel – for what that’s worth.

    Mizrock: Over the air is better.

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  9. Even though it looks like shit, I’m just glad MSNBC finally upgraded. I wonder what took so long? However, there are plenty of folk out there who think that HD that’s provided by their cable/satellite company is the end all/be all of HD, when in fact, it’s nowhere close the quality that Blu-ray provides. Yeah, they’re getting 100+ HD channels, but in order to do that, DTV and every other cable company has to compress the shit out of the signal, thus giving us those nasty pixelated images you don’t see on BD. Still, I’ll take shitty looking HD over the best SD any day of the week.

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  11. And there’s CNN’s HD where a 1.33:1 ratio is also used–though commercials are often shown widescreen. But the picture’s at least a little better than the “normal” version.

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  12. Ed Schulz, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews’ faces in High Definition?!

    Somebody pinch me!

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  13. AMC better HD up before “Mad Men” returns. That’s all I’m sayin’.

    (I usually wait a day and catch it in HD On Demand)

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  15. “HD by definition is 1920 x 1080. However, 1280 x 720 is also being marketed as “HD” simply because it’s larger than SD 640 x 480.”

    This is not correct. 720p is part of the official HD standard just like 1080i or 1080p. In fact, some of the best-looking HD coverage on TV is in 720p (national Fox Sports events). In fact, often-times 720p will look better than 1080i over digital cable networks because there’s less compression happening.

    Of course, a lot of cable channels cheat and will either deliver lower-resolution video (480p, which isn’t HD) or will tremendously compress the signal, leading to really shitty-looking images. And half the time these stations will be stretching or squishing the image, displaying an incorrect aspect ratio. TBS and TNT have been particularly bad in this respect.

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  17. Over-the-air HD is superior to cable or satellite HD, but of course you can only get ‘broadcast’ channels.

    My Comcast has only about 20 HD channels, and for a couple (especially WTBS HD), the image is often some 1.33 image stretched to fit widescreen. Even if there is a widescreen equivalent! Even if there is a widescreen image available, it’s still this gross stretched crap that’s not ‘HD’.

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  18. My favorite TBS fuckup was when they were just upscaling 480p content and stretching it to fit — so there was constant ugly distorted versions of “Friends”, “Everybody Loves Raymond”, etc. That was bad enough — but I was willing to overlook it because these were old shows that were standard-def to begin with and TBS clearly wasn’t comfortable showing them without filling the frame. Lame, but whatever.

    But then they started airing recent versions of “The Office” — shot and originally aired in HD — without changing their setup! So now they had an HD show that was being squished…. which, of course, made the show letterboxed when it shouldn’t be. So they found a way to fuck two things up instead of one. I actually emailed them asking them to fix it, and they wrote back saying they didn’t want to confuse the consumer. WTF.

    (At least now that I have Dish Network I can force a channel to change its aspect ratio format.)

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  19. Who gives a fuck, it’s MSNBC, they’re already slathered in makeup anyway. Why do you need a crystal perfect image of people talking about the items of the day? Oh that’s right, because you wasted so much money on a fucking HD set.

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  23. My Comcast has only about 20 HD channels, and for a couple (especially WTBS HD), the image is often some 1.33 image stretched to fit widescreen. Even if there is a widescreen equivalent! Even if there is a widescreen image available, it’s still this gross stretched crap that’s not ‘HD’.

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