Hey everyone!
I just bought a brand new 65” Samsung KS8000 TV (which as an aside, I highly recommend as the best picture quality you can find on a TV of that size for the lowest price) on Black Friday to use with my Hopper 3 receiver I got a few months ago. So the last few days I’ve been messing around with it and going through all the various settings and modes, because I’m obsessed with getting the highest quality picture. Here’s a recap of what I found.
If you have any 4K content from the Hopper to feed it, the quality is amazing no matter what. For Hopper 4K sources I sampled a PPV title, a free streaming show On Demand, and Netflix, and they all looked fantastic. The picture quality was not *as* nice as streaming 4K Amazon and Netflix titles from the built-in apps on the TV, but the difference is barely perceptible, and I suspect that is only because the content from Amazon supports HDR natively, and because nothing has to be transferred over an HDMI cable to get to the TV, “cutting out the middleman”, so to speak.
Regular HD content is where things get interesting, because that’s 95% of what I and most people will be watching for the foreseeable future, and what Dish primarily offers.
For most native 1080i programming, the quality is just “good”, with occasional visual artifacting. In general, any computer generated graphics (like the lower third graphics on the news) upscale perfectly on my TV. Other content can be hit or miss. This is where setting the different picture modes/profiles on the TV can definitely help, especially for movies.
For 720p native content, there are issues. I used the OSU-Michigan game on ABC/ESPN as a test for this. There were visual artifacts all over the screen, and the quality for this was the worst of anything I tested. A big reason for this is the image was being upscaled twice. The native 720p source was being output in 1080i by the Hopper receiver (because I had 1080i/1080p/4K selected in Dish settings), and upscaled again to 4K by the TV. To resolve it, I changed the output of the receiver to 720p to match the source, leaving the TV to do all the upscaling. After this change, the overall picture quality improved to “okay/decent” and a lot of the visual artifacting was gone, but at a cost of decreased sharpness everywhere, especially for still/slow-moving images.
The annoying thing then became switching between 720p and 1080i/1080p/4K in the Hopper settings any time a channel was changed, because Dish does not offer a “Source Native” mode. If you wanted to switch it manually like me, you can find out which channels broadcast in which resolution natively here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television_in_the_United_States
I was resigned to this less than ideal solution until I discovered a trick to make the Hopper output 4K regardless of what was being watched. All you have to do is turn on “Sports Bar mode” in PIP to push a 4K res image to the TV, and then select one of the 4 quadrants to make it full screen. The receiver remains outputting 4K and the resulting quality was MUCH better than anything before, for both 1080i and 720p sources. There was nearly zero artifacting and the image was as sharp as can be.
For other Hopper 3 users with 4K TVs, can you try this and see if your picture quality improves as well?
For any software engineers at Dish reading this, can you make 4K it’s own option in settings instead of lumping it in with 1080i/1080p so the receiver outputs that res all the time? It would be nice to not have to resort to the Sports Bar hack, and I suspect would be an even better solution than offering a “Native” resolution option that a lot of people were clamoring for.
I just bought a brand new 65” Samsung KS8000 TV (which as an aside, I highly recommend as the best picture quality you can find on a TV of that size for the lowest price) on Black Friday to use with my Hopper 3 receiver I got a few months ago. So the last few days I’ve been messing around with it and going through all the various settings and modes, because I’m obsessed with getting the highest quality picture. Here’s a recap of what I found.
If you have any 4K content from the Hopper to feed it, the quality is amazing no matter what. For Hopper 4K sources I sampled a PPV title, a free streaming show On Demand, and Netflix, and they all looked fantastic. The picture quality was not *as* nice as streaming 4K Amazon and Netflix titles from the built-in apps on the TV, but the difference is barely perceptible, and I suspect that is only because the content from Amazon supports HDR natively, and because nothing has to be transferred over an HDMI cable to get to the TV, “cutting out the middleman”, so to speak.
Regular HD content is where things get interesting, because that’s 95% of what I and most people will be watching for the foreseeable future, and what Dish primarily offers.
For most native 1080i programming, the quality is just “good”, with occasional visual artifacting. In general, any computer generated graphics (like the lower third graphics on the news) upscale perfectly on my TV. Other content can be hit or miss. This is where setting the different picture modes/profiles on the TV can definitely help, especially for movies.
For 720p native content, there are issues. I used the OSU-Michigan game on ABC/ESPN as a test for this. There were visual artifacts all over the screen, and the quality for this was the worst of anything I tested. A big reason for this is the image was being upscaled twice. The native 720p source was being output in 1080i by the Hopper receiver (because I had 1080i/1080p/4K selected in Dish settings), and upscaled again to 4K by the TV. To resolve it, I changed the output of the receiver to 720p to match the source, leaving the TV to do all the upscaling. After this change, the overall picture quality improved to “okay/decent” and a lot of the visual artifacting was gone, but at a cost of decreased sharpness everywhere, especially for still/slow-moving images.
The annoying thing then became switching between 720p and 1080i/1080p/4K in the Hopper settings any time a channel was changed, because Dish does not offer a “Source Native” mode. If you wanted to switch it manually like me, you can find out which channels broadcast in which resolution natively here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television_in_the_United_States
I was resigned to this less than ideal solution until I discovered a trick to make the Hopper output 4K regardless of what was being watched. All you have to do is turn on “Sports Bar mode” in PIP to push a 4K res image to the TV, and then select one of the 4 quadrants to make it full screen. The receiver remains outputting 4K and the resulting quality was MUCH better than anything before, for both 1080i and 720p sources. There was nearly zero artifacting and the image was as sharp as can be.
For other Hopper 3 users with 4K TVs, can you try this and see if your picture quality improves as well?
For any software engineers at Dish reading this, can you make 4K it’s own option in settings instead of lumping it in with 1080i/1080p so the receiver outputs that res all the time? It would be nice to not have to resort to the Sports Bar hack, and I suspect would be an even better solution than offering a “Native” resolution option that a lot of people were clamoring for.
