Cable HD PQ vs. Voom HD PQ - a Dead Heat

[techweb]

I decided to try out my local cable company's HD offering under a special promotion to compare with Voom, and to get an HD DVR. There are also a few SD channels like Science Channel that I miss not having on Voom. For the next six months, I'm only paying a few dollars more a month than I was already paying for cable modem service, and the added services include basic, digital, HD, and the HD DVR (Moto 6208).

There are only a couple channels in common between the two services, and the PQ on the two services appears to be identical on those channels. Depending on program, HDNet PQ is excellent ( I'll bet it looks a lot better than it does on DirecTV right now). The cable co. is wisely multiplexing only two HD channels per 256-QAM RF channel, so there's a full 19.4Mbps bandwidth per HD channel.

The DVR works well, although there's only about 10-12 hours of HD. The main downside is that the SD MPEG-2 encoder used to convert analog channels to digital is only mediocre, but that's not an issue for me since I watch little SD and record even less. Hope to swap the box out with a 6412, which should be available in the next month or so,

 

[riffjim4069]

My local Cable Co. stuffs 3 channels per 256-QAM RF channel - 13Mb. I have been able to compare only one common HD channel (Starz) and found it to be identical.

I observed the PQ for the DNC was much better on INVOOM (999) than it was on Cable Co's INHD and HDNet. There was too much red push on VOOM's coverage of the RNC, which made a comparison impossible.

I have also noticed the PQ on Cable's INHDs (and the programming in general) was better than that being show on the HDNets.