Using DirectTiVo (which does both satellite and terrestrial HD) shows DirectTV HD to be poor quality compared to the exact same show in broadcast TV. This is apparently due to DirectTV way over compressing the show.

A "bit-rate" specification for HD, similar to what you get for audio like MPEG and AAC would be a nice thing to see...

Author again misses much (history per this author's earlier articles on hd tvs).

TV shows (and TV movies) of the past shot on film have the potential to look amazing when converted to high def if the original film stock is used. In the 70's began the movement to analog video tape and this is where the quailty will be quite bad since the analog video bandwidth was quite limited and the video tape is prone to fade.

The "remastered" high-def star trek looks quite good, as an example of film (of the past) being used to convert to high def. As film has "infinite" resolution its easy to color correct film (once high-def digitized) for that nice "saturated color" modern look :-).

Lets get a few things straight here. As this author seems a bit nieve.

1. ABC and Fox are currently using 720P. Part of the reason for this decision is that the P part of the 720P makes sports action look better. The other is that in over the air signals, a 720P signal takes less Bits/Sec, and this allows them to split the channel to DT-1, DT-2 and DT-3. Then they can sell space and time on their affiliates for the additional signals. A 702P signal does limit the bandwidth allocated to DT-2 and DT-3, however, vs an SD signal on DT-1.

In general ABC O&O's (owned and operated) stations are programiing a news channel as DT-2 and a weather channel as DT-3. Note that DT-2 is an SD channel and DT-3 is a less than SD quality channel.

NBC and CBS are 1080i. This means that when they are in HD mode over the DT channel, they cannot program DT-2 or DT-3 (those would be off the air, when they are sending SD programming over DT-1, they can have DT-2 and DT-3. Generally PBS does this with their stations.

Cable takes their feeds directly from the stations, now a days, and not over the air, so can have DT-1,2,3 all the time for use on the cable channels. Comcast often enters into cross promotion ideas with the network affiliates for promoting their DT-2,3 signals on Digital cable channels.

I agree, most dramatic TV shows were produced in film. Sit-coms are often shot in tape via the 3-cam method perfected by I Love Lucy.

Film TV shows may have been edited on 35mm (4000 pixel equivalent resolution) or 16mm or super 16. Most were distributed in 16mm or super 16. Some were even shot in super 16. Super 16 does not have the same resolution, but scales well to at least 720 if not 1080. The i/p difference for Film is moot as most HD-TV's detect 2/3 film pull down, as that is a featuer of the DT stream to better use the MPEG bandwidth. Almost all TV shows on film are 24fps.

Having said all that, I am surprised how little research this columnist did for his article. He didn't even check with the engineering departments of the networks for what signal spec they are using.

Quality of the end product at your HDTV is basicly a two step question.
What is the source material. Old video-Bad, HD video-Good to Great, Film 16mm-Good, Film 35 and 70mm-Great to excelent.
What is the deliver system. Satelite-bad to good, OTA-Good to Great,
HD disc-good to excelent.
The result at the TV will never be better than the worst of its source and delivery.

Why on earth is Mark Raby still allowed to write about HDTV?

Every article he writes is dumbed down and filled with opinion. There's no need for it; this is a technology website - most of the readers here know a lot more than Raby gives them credit for. Instead of saying that "older tv shows will look terrible in HD" he should have given a technical explanation, such as "older tv shows shot on video tape will look terrible in HD, while older tv shows shot with film should look great, since 35mm analog film resolution is much higher than the current digital tv resolutions (i.e. in the range of about 3000-3400 compared to HDTV's current maximum of 1080).

I think the HD content provided by tv companies is still very poor in quantity and genre. So, I take the newsserver way: UseNet, Giganews and a 256 bit secure SSL tunnel download. I watch HD content with my PC when I want and what I want. I even get to watch on my 42" plasma screen without HDCP. Kind like a tivo but not quit the same.
Oh, to make this legal, make sure you live in a EU country where this is aloud. MCPA? Not in my backyard.
LOL

they should ave 2 articles, 1 above the other, one just says the article name "Is all HDTV Programming The Same?" then a simple 1 word answer, "yes", then next says the title "Is all HDTV Programming The Same?" and "just kidding" followed by the content, or somethign similar to that effect, for comical purposes