Which HDTV service has the best quality?

[Blitzburgh]

Yup. Cable is going to run into bandwidth limitations if haven't already.

DirecTV & Dish are where you want to position yourself for the future.

the sky is the limit no pun intended....lol

[waterhead]

The best picture quality, for the money, is free over-the-air HDTV.

No compression.

No HD-Light.

And best of all:

NO FEES!

[SRW1000]

The best picture quality, for the money, is free over-the-air HDTV.

No compression.

No HD-Light.

And best of all:

NO FEES!

Agreed.  (Except for the negative effects of multicasting seen on two local stations.)

Scott

[tencom]

With MPEG 4 HDTV  bit rate at about  8 to 10 megabits Picture quality, has to suffer. A 1080I  video  before it"s digitalty compressed has a bit rate of around 1.2 gigabits  which means it has been compressed at about  150 to 1 ratio. With that much compression being applied something has to give and it's picture quality. In fact it might also be considered, to be another form of  HD-LITE

[AndrewP]

The best picture quality, for the money, is free over-the-air HDTV.

No compression.

No HD-Light.

And best of all:

NO FEES!

When the weather permits;) or local stations skip their weather logos.
Otherwise:bang:
I have at least an option to switch to Chicago OTA.
But when you watch a recorded OTA during the bad weather:o

[Blitzburgh]

The best picture quality, for the money, is free over-the-air HDTV.

No compression.

No HD-Light.

And best of all:

NO FEES!

With DirecTV my MPEG4 HD locals as good as OTA.

[Mark Strube]

Well, getting back to the original question - if we're just talking about picture quality on only the high definition channels (and not the channel selection)... Cable and/or off-the-air is your best bet. Cable is the only provider at the moment that will give you completely untouched feeds as the cable networks (HBO, etc) send them to the different providers. Both Dish Network and DirecTV downsample and compress almost all of their HD channels.

If we're talking channel selection, or predictions of eventual quality down the road- that's a completely separate discussion.

No source, whether it's cable, satellite, or off-the-air, is going to get anywhere near the quality that's possible with HD sources such as game consoles or HD-DVD... not for quite some time at least. Television content is encoded into high definition video on-the-fly, and in some cases due to local affiliates - more than one time; while the great-looking content you're talking about is either rendered in that box by a 3D video card (games) or encoded into very high-bitrate video using multiple encoding passes, so it can more efficiently place bits of data as they're needed by scene (HD-DVD/Blu-Ray).