Hello

I have a question concerning the "quality" of satellite TV Picture.

I have just arrived in the USA from the United Kingdom and have
purchased a new Sony flat screen 27" television (model KV-27FS200). I
had Satellite TV installed last weekend by the Dish Network who
installed a Dish 500 receiver and I have a PVR500 box (the thing that
I presume converts the signal to the TV and also is a digital
recorder). Thus all of the equipment is no older than a few weeks.

The problem with the picture is that it pixelates in areas of one
colour and around outlines - the only thing I can compare it to is
like when recieving a j.peg image by email and zooming in so that the
image starts to look like little squares here an there.

My question is this: How can I improve the quality of the picture to
get a sharper image? (note I have tried using the sharpness control,
which if set toward the maximum only seems to make the picute look
more pixelated).

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Request for Question Clarification by sycophant-ga on 18 Apr 2003 04:42 PDT

Have you had much experience with satellite digital television before?

What you are describing sounds very much like the generally reality of
satellite TV - it is MPEG-2 relics, which will be obvious is areas of
uniform colour, complex lines, and fast action (such as explosions).

If you like, I can provide a lot of information about the effect, and
what aspects will affect the quality of the satellite picture.

I suggest you contact your service provider and see if they will tell
you the bandwidth they have allocated to each channel. You can run
digital TV on anything from 1.5mbit upwards or so (you can do less,
but no-one would pay).

Let me know what you can find out, and if you'd like me to pursue this
angle of research for you.

I have worked in operations for a digital television broadcaster, so I
have some level of experience in this area.

Regards,
sycophant-ga

I am unsure where the problem could be.  How is your PVR connected?(I
mean through
which output: coaxial, composite video, svideo?). Are you referring to
live programs or
the recorded ones?.  Is there any quality setting in the PVR?(Did you
check the PVR
manual throughly?).  I suspect that you could be running the PVR in
the continuos
record->playback mode(which allows you to rewind live programs) and
that the quality
setting is set for maximum record time instead of best video quality. 
I do not own a
PVR and I can only guess.

The easiest way of checking is to bypass the PVR with another Dish
receiver
and connect the output through better video interface such as S-Video.
 If you still
do not see much difference, the problem could be in the source(I mean
the digital
satellite signal itself).  Let me know your findings.

Regards
ldavinci-ga

I'm not familiar with the PVR, but my guess is dish network is at
fault. When the small dish picks up too little signal the receiver
(PVR?) keeps repeating the old data until it gets fresh information.
This produces the tiling = pixelating you see. We see it occassionly
even on cable TV where the cable company gets the program from dish
network or direct TV. You can test this by disconnecting at the TV and
shutting off the dish network equipment. Poke a peice of fine wire in
the center connection  (antena or cable input)on your Sony TV. You
should be able to get a good picture on at least one local channel,
with absolutely no tiling = pixelating. Use a longer peice of fine
wire if necessary. If you get tiling without the equipment from dish
network the problem is likely the Sony TV.   Neil