Picture better????

[horsegoer]

I am going to be getting the series 3 and the cable card from my cable company. I have a 55" plasma and was wondering if anyone has noticed a PQ improvement when using a cable card instead of wires?

Thanks

[msdonnelly]

Surprisingly, yes. My cable has always been fuzzy at certain times of the day, on the lower number channels. Since hooking up the S-3 with cable cards I've noticed consistently better picture quality.

[cgould]

Cablecard shouldn't do anything to "picture quality", it just decodes encrypted & remaps digital channels, not anything to the datastream or picture.

However as the 2nd post noted, sometimes this remapping includes using ADS (digital simulcast) SD versions of analog 1-99 channels, instead of the analog cable version, and in that case your picture quality may change (change can be good or bad, depending on your analog quality and the bitrate etc.)

The S3 does have noticeably better PQ on digital cable SD channels than my old Comcast Motorola 6412 did, though.

You can check in the diagnostics menu which you get, by tuning both channels to "analog" ones, go to diagnostics, and see if it says QAM or RF tuning (QAM is digital.)

[TydalForce]

I don't have cablecards, just using analogue cable in with my S3, and even as such, the picture quality is noticably better.

When I still had my Humax hooked up, I was switching back and forth inputs on the TV and could see it quite noticably.

[jmX]

The picture quality is way better. Rather than recompressing a stream that's probably already been compressed and decompressed once, you just view the original data straight from the cable provider (for digital channels...which seems to be most of the channels I watch).

Watching a show now on my series 2 is painful.

For analog channels on series 3, I don't know if there's as much of a visible difference.

[SCSIRAID]

Originally Posted by horsegoer

I am going to be getting the series 3 and the cable card from my cable company. I have a 55" plasma and was wondering if anyone has noticed a PQ improvement when using a cable card instead of wires?

Thanks

Your question doesnt indicate where a) the cablecard is going and b) what the wires are attached to. What are you trying to compare?

If I assume you are comparing a cable box to a tivo with cablecard... you will likely see better PQ with the Tivo than a typical cable box. Cable boxes typically use the cheapest components they can get. The component of interest in this discussion is the MPEG decoder. It is what takes the digital stream from the cableco and decompresses it for transmission to or usage within the display.