Local Dish HD channels - quality went up?

[stck4evr]

I subscribed to local dish HD channels back in March 2006. I had it for few months and since they were dramatically worse than channels from comcast, I stopped paying for them. Now, starting in Jan 2007 I subscribed again, and I noticed that
the pictures seems to be much better - much closer to what I get from comcast.
Note the quality is still slightly worse than cable signal, but it's seems way better than in March of 2006.
This is locals from Chicago (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX) Note I was comparing CBS and NBC only. Now a question - did they really improve or my eyes are going? Did they switch to mpeg4 sometime last year? Do they use a better compression codec? Better bitrate?
Note I'm using Vip622, DishHD 1000

 

[garys]

There were a lot of problems when they were turned on in a lot of the different markets. They seem to take a couple of months to get most of the problems taken care of. Yes, there is an improvement.