paulr

3.What is recognsied as giving the best quality tv feed. Cable,Freeview or Sky or is there no difference.


cheers.

EDITED...others answered.

Mike_Hunt

1.Pass.
2. RGB Scart or component
3. Sky just edges it on the more mainstream channels.
4. Sharper picture and better positioning from what I can tell.

HTH

paulr

3. Would cable not be better than sky because sky can suffer from adverse weather conditions affecting the signal or is that just making assumptions without facts.

hades

1. (a) By the label on the packet. (b) by using a multimeter to test whether all pins are connected in the right order *you need to know the pin outs for this. (c) generally if you open one plug up and there is a wire soldered to all the pins, it'll probably be RGB

2. In order, component, RGB, S-Video, normal Video

3. It depends - There is a difference between different brands of freeview etc. A good one of each should give very similar results

4. RGB is better as it uses 3 cables to transmit the signal, S-video uses two, normal video uses 1. In simple terms, this nominally allows 3 times the signal bandwidth, i.e. allows 3 times as much data to be transmitted for the same picture. More data = better picture.

Mike_Hunt

That's a fair point and one I didn't take into consideration, I based it on an "everything is equal" and optimum conditions etc.

hectic

Answer one.
if a scart is 'fully loaded' i.e all 21 pins connected, it would be considered as the better alternative and should give RGB.. a 7 pin load would not .. each pin is there to 'do' a specific task ..

a general 'rule of thumb' is that if you look at two diferent leads , one being thinner than the other, put it down.. go for the thicker lead..

hades

The whole point of digital is that generally if you can get the signal you don't lose quality. As long as the sky box is receiving all the data, adverse weather doesn't matter. If it isn't getting the data you won't lose picture quality, you'll lose the whole picture.

hectic

do you not ralise that the channels that 'cable ' put out, which are SKY based.. are actually fed and received generally in the *same way* as your average house install? i.e straight to a dish, then transferred to the CATV network by the cable company?

paulr

Regarding scarts,i 've noticed Comet sell some for over 100 pounds. Whats to say how good the wiring is that connects the scart socket internally on the tv and dvd player. Is that a sensible question to ask.

Mike_Hunt

I bought one of those but it does give a better picture than the "cheaper" one at £59.95

hectic

you will notice a 'slight ' difference, but if you buy a £100 scart and plug it into the back of a £14.99 portable , would you 'expect' a perfect picture?

paulr

Okay.

hades

It's a completely sensible question to ask. If you have "average to decent" gear - e.g. Sky box, decent 32" TV, possible a small AV amp and speakers, you'll get a noticable benefit for getting a good £25 SCART lead, but after that I wouldn't bother as the rest of the kit is more a limiting factor than the leads.

If you have a toop of the range TV, DVD etc than a £100 SCART lead is worth it - but you'd get better still by going HD with a good quality HDMI lead!

As for Comet's £100 SCART - I don't know it, but would bet farily strongly that you could get a lot better quality lead for no more money from a "real" hi-fi / home cinema type shop, or somewhere like Richer Sounds, etc.

Diesel

I really have never understood all the bollox talked about quality of almost zero current bearing signal transfer over a whopping great big metre! A £1.99 SCART should do you fine mate - unless it has a significantly higher resistance than a £100 one [which it wont!!!] If you are sending some SDI HD signals over more than 50 metres back to an OB truck then invest in some nicer stuff! D

Lum

I disagree with a few points here.

1) The expensive SCART leads. Most normal people shouldn't need to go above £30 for a lead, there's really only 4 kind of leads out there.
- Your basic crappy lead for a fiver, black wire, silver pins that flop about (Common brands: Maplins own brand)
- Decent wire, will actually have OFC, a decent thickness and good shielding. It will also have pointless gold pins and a bunch of blurb on the back that is mostly complete ****e, however the wire is still worth getting (Common brands: Thor, Techlink, Profigold)
- The same wire as above, sold in Dixons for twice the price (Common brand: Monster cable)
- Stupidly expensive stuff which is better but the gains are insignificant with the kind of equipment found in an average household (Common brand: Ixos)


2) Component (aka YUV) vs RGB. There is no definate answer as to which is the better.

All DVDs and digital TV are encoded in YUV format, all TVs use RGB to actually display an image, at some point there will be a conversion from YUV to RGB going on.

If the RGB converter in your DVD player (or Sky box) is better than the one in your TV then RGB will provide a better picture, if the converter in your TV is better than the one in your DVD player or Sky box then component will provide a better picture.

3) Which type of broadcast has the best picture: Sky

The reason is simple.. quality of boxes aside, picture quality is most affected by how much bandwidth is allocated to the channel you're watching. It is identical to how a 50MB video you download off the internet will look worse than a 500MB video of the same thing. The only difference is you are watching it as it downloads rather than saving it to a disk. If you don't believe me, switch to one of those ****ty txt channels up in the 700 range on Sky and note how even the static text has horrible fuzzyness around it that makes it look like a poor quality JPEG file.

Freeview does not have much bandwidth available and is qute heavily compressed. When they finally get rid of analogue TV more bandwidth will become available and they wont have to compress it so much, however they're just going to add more ****ty channels instead.

Sky has more bandwidth than cable, though they also have more channels. I have had the opportunity to compare the BBC and ITV channels on Sky and (Telewest) Cable on the same TV and the picture definately suffers from more blockiness on Cable than it does on Sky.

That said, the quality of Sky has gone downhill lately. I think they're doing it delibarately in order to make their new HD channels look like it was worth spending all that money.

Shark Man

I agree. Freeview on the main 5 channels comes in close though in good reception areas .

Cable (telewest in mycase) is inferior to both. That combined with the most annoyingly slow set top box that man ever made.

Terestrial analogue used to be superb in our area and was clearly superior to all digital broadcast formats (was especially notiicable on football games). But the signal is now weaker due to digital terestrial so there is ghosting. As well the picture quality has detriorated with digital artifacts presumably gained from the conversion equipment at the transmitter or the uplink source.

Best broadcast pictures I have seen in recent times, barring HD is German analogue satelite (Astra 1C to 1H and 2C @ 19.2 degree East). It's hard to believe that digital has sent us backwards in picture quality

Shark Man

Oh yes you do loose quality, but it needs to be a very low signal strength with a high error rate in the feed. Then things start getting interesting....that's before you get the stop/start and scretching chirps from the audio. But generally the watchable threashold is still very good to intents. You can tell when the signal is poor as it starts going blocky, getting artifacts, losing sync and goes to pot on highspeed pictures or where the whole screen has moving objects (pannning shots, fire/explosions, rivers, football pitches etc.)

In Spain, our feed hovers anywhere between to 20% and 60% strength. BBC2 is no go and Channel 4 is one that suffers alot. You can tell by the picture when its on its way out before it starts jerking and screetching- somtimes have to clean the cobwebs off the dish and move the parasol to get that channel back.

Lum

But.. but.. all those extra channels.
With analogue TV we wouldn't ever have been able to have channels like QVC +1

Shark Man

Worth it to have the "old" Eurosport back

Although MTV Deutchland makes up for lack of English channels - it has even more ringtone ads and europop than all the UK music channels put together

And you can still pick up QVC (although in German)

hades

Just because you don't understand something, doesn't mean it's "bollox". Another option is that you either don't have the intelligence or knowledge to understand something that is demonstrably true. In this case, I'm sure the latter option is the case.

There is a lot more to transmitting a signal than the resistance of the conductor. As this thread title includes "simple answers required", I won't go into all the science as to why, I'll just say IMHO the original poster should ignore you.

Shark Man

Come on then...lets see you post the mathematical theory of capacitance, inductance, reactance and dialectrics

hades

Do a google, no sense me typing it, especially as there's no fancy diagrams, formulae etc toold on scoobynet.

That is why I qualified my post with the terms "generally", and the phrase "as long as it's receiving all the data". High error rate in feed = not all the data (or at least not all the correct data). Again, I was trying to "keep it simple".

Diesel

Aha! A very stuffy posting that is clearly from a man who sells £100 leads to same minded geeks! An induced over reactance maybe [o no looks like I'm a geek too!!!]

Enjoy your superb picture quality mate whilst mine crackles, fizzess and humms as it fades to grey on its big component run from my DVD to the TV.

Honestly if I had any knowledge I'm sure I'd know what you were on about LOL!

*SAVE YOUR CASH* *DONT BUY SKYHOOKS EITHER*

D

Shark Man

LOL such is the importance of dumbing down

hades

Well, you're very wrong on the first point, but I suppose I should expect nothing else based on your track record of talking bollox so far.

In case you hadn't noticed as I'd only said it once very clearly above, I suggested £100 leads might be worth it to people with "high end" gear but weren't worth it with normal gear. The effects of cabling don't go as far as making a pciture fade, fizzle or hum, but they can degrade the sharpness / colour / purity of sound a little. If you're paying £10k for a fancy ultimate TV, it seems rather silly to waste some of the ultimate performance for the sake of a £100 on a lead.

Anyway, I'll leave you to you delusions of adequacy and go no further in a battle of wits against someone who is so clearly completely unarmed.

Apologies to Paul for deviation from topic, general gist is get yourself a half decent lead from somewhere more "specialist" and cheaper than Comet, and it's probably worth paying £20-30 to get some reasonable improvement over a £5 lead. Beyond that, it's diminishing returns, so don't bother spending much more.

Diesel

I'd like to fully apologise for disagreeing with you and in so doing bringing out the Voltaire in you []. As penance am off to Comet to buy a £149 curly cable for my phone so as I learn to listen and hear things better! QED [the Latin not the brand] - you can lead a horse to water but a Hi Fi must be expensively lead!