freeview is crap?

[Mike]

Doing what ?

[Mike]

Don't worry - they introduced widescreen to stop using part of the signal and equalise matters.

To tell your television exactly what a formula 1 car is doing digitally as it crosses your screen would take up between 50 and 150Mbps, as it does in most computer games. Transmitting the whole picture again actually saves bandwidth.

[raden]

In message , Mike writes

Fuck knows, I lost contact years ago living in the far east, not making quite so much money

[raden]

In message , Mike writes

Dunno, I'd left the country by then

[Bob Eager]

Selling the Brooklyn Bridge? ;-)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

On the contrary, I could just about run a one bar electric fire off the signal I get - I can see CP winking at me through the window at the minute.

The sharpness was what I was referring to. For all its other faults, it's not normally soft.

Of course, many of the 'cheap' channels look soft, but that's as much down to crappy cameras and their set up as anything else.

My main complaint is the lack of detail in flesh tones. Everyone looks like Des O'Connor. ;-)

If a prog was made in 4:3, I'll watch it in analogue. With 16:9, usually digital - although my set is still a 4:3 one.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Hmm. I'm just a lowly sound engineer, but it is my understanding that the equivalent of the luminance bandwith of analogue - ie 5.5 megs - which gives the resolution, is greater. Certainly on the odd occasion where I've seen a test card this is borne out. And my set *does* resolve the 5.5 meg bars on the analogue test card. Of course, when you introduce movement the argument becomes blurred. ;-)

Depends on what you mean. The resolution on pure reds for example was diabolical in analogue - and I know in theory this followed the eye's response, but in practice digital really shows this up.

No they didn't. 14 bit is where most can't tell the difference. And with

16 bit over sampled you get a dynamic range far in excess of anything needed for an end user system.

Only if they don't allow the digital system to then be used as intended. Same with DAB. Unfortunately, I suspect the worst too.

[tony sayer]

In article , JJ writes

Well perhaps our B&O is better at that than others. The absolutely ironic thing is that the signal to our local transmitter Sandy Heath is sent there as a digital signal but the bit rate thats at is something else!.

And the bandwidth starved that you speak of isn't likely to get better is it?....

[Steve Firth]

Learn to read the instructions and set up your STB to use RGB, not composite and certainly not the UHF modulator output.

[Steve Firth]

And how. It's an odd idea for a channel - to obtain presenters by picking up a few women previously plying trade at Liverpool docks and to select men from PCWorld/Currys.

[Andy Hall]

Same occupation then :-)

[s--p--o--n--i--x]

Hooray! He has seen the light!

sPoNiX

[Bob Mannix]

Might I respectfully suggest a move to uk.tech.digital-tv, where this is, and has been for some time, a hot topic and where there are plenty of people to both commiserate and even tell you where to write to!

[IMM]

Arev these women inport/exporters?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think it must be, since DVD input is fine. Its also beter using teh analoge RF part of te CVD/video recorder.

Its not a set issue: Its the digital quality., Its noticeably less sharp, and the colours are more washed out as well. The latter I accept as being a simple contrast change, but the set is not as far as I know able to affect shrapness on analogue. I don't think ity has edge peaking.

I'll check tho.

Yerrrs. Maybe its becase teh signal here is very good, and tehantenna is thanks to Tony, very good, and te TV is a large 30 something inch trimnitron from Sony. I.e. its as good as it gets. Most people on smaller TV's would probably not notice the difference.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah. Here its 6 of one ....its less sharp, but less prone to striping from foreign transmissions on digital. .

[The Natural Philosopher]

Can you expand (:-)) on that?

16 bits are still rather better than a vinyl disc IMHO.

Mmm.

[The Natural Philosopher]

if you take 5.5Mhz and multiply by say - 24 bits, to represent teh analogue ability o have varying aplitude, you come up with a whopping

132Mbps data rate for uncompressed video.

The phosphors currently available are not perfect in any respect. To design a display screen that can reproduce eberythjuing the eye can see requires phoshors whose emmtiannce spectra closesly matches the eyes detection spectra.

This simply is not the case, although I hear tell of some new OLED devices that may be better - but they are 5-7 years away from large screen production at least.

In the meantime its all an unholy compromise.

I tend to agree. 16 bits is what? 16*6dB from bit noise floor to peak amplitude. Thats 96dB S/N ratio peak. At the best teh analogue stuff was around 65dB at 2mV form a moving coil pickup, and with maye a 20dB overlaod before the neddle jumped off teh record. 85dB. 16 bits exceeds that.

With a decent power amplifier only having a 100dB - maybe 110dB dynamic range, 96dB is well good enough for anyone who dfoesn;t pklay music at full volume the whole time.

The sampling frequency was a BIT too low, to exploit without VERY expensive filters to kill ulstrasonics pre sampling without introducing phase shifts and other anomlaies.

Use of oversampling and presumably interpolation reduces the constraints on post decode filtering, and actually allows te sepciiation to reach its potential accuracy: Early CD players with more primitive D to A converters were frankly, inferior enough to be heard clearly as such. This is not true of todays crop.

Yes. Its a tade off between total spectrum bandwidth, number of channles, and quality of cahnnels.

Are you saying that its possible to e.g. get 100Mbps plus on a given TV channel, (using the kit we have) but in practice its restriced to say 5Mbps?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have.

Its not possible to send UHF down a scart socket.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

You can check easily by trying the colour control - it should have no effect on RGB.

Is the STB set to RGB output in its menu?

While its true the depth of colours isn't as good as analogue, the saturation should be the same. You've got a funny somewhere

Thinks. What make of Freeview box have you got? Not by any chance the Thompson on special offer from Curry's? Under 40 quid or so?

On my set I can switch between the RGB, composite and RF output of my STB. And the analogue signal. And although of course there are differences, they're not ones that could be improved by any alterations of black level, contrast or colour controls.