Well, we watched the superbowl this weekend. It's too bad the Seahawks didn't win -- it could be a while before they have the chance again. ;)

Now, we don't have cable anymore so we couldn't watch it at our house. However, a friend of ours does a Superbowl party almost every year. We went over this year to find that he had just had a new TV delivered -- literally, the morning before. It was a nice, large, Sony LCD (I think?) 1080p TV. The TV was exceptional. The contrast ratio was amazing and the size was great.

However, the ABC HD broadcast wasn't so amazing. The video compression artifacting was terrible. You could see it on all of the overlay graphics. In some cases you could see the whole lower status part blur away into artifacting because the low bandwidth compression couldn't keep up. This is in no way the TV screen's fault. The decoder could be partly to blame, or Comcast could be partly to blame by over compressing the signal.

Either way, it looked a whole lot better when it was either smaller or when you were farther away. But don't get me wrong: the quality was fart better than a normal TV. In fact, the overall video experience was one of the best that I'd seen. And I like oggling the big screens at Costco. :)

It's actually curious that right now on the HD channels you can get a better signal over-the-air (satellite HD, cable HD, or even just broadcast digital HD) that you can via a DVD. Sure, HD DVD and Bluray are coming soon to solve that problem, but it's an amusing short term situation.

Posted by Shane on February 6, 2006 9:35 PM | Permalink