ScottMac wrote:
btm73 wrote:
InMo wrote:Well I guess you should be glad you live in America where you have the freedom to choose, So quit you complaining.
I personally have had no issues with my HD, in fact I switched From Direct TV as well.. And am glad I did..
Well, some of us have 20/20 vision and the compression bothers us. So, if everything is so great in your own little HD heaven, why come on these forums? You can come on here and tell someone to quit complaining. Well, I can tell you to go live in your dream world and quit trolling.
Yeah, and a lot of you work for the cable company. And, since we don't buy your crap product anymore, you come here to spread the misery you can't impose on us with your overpriced crap signal and lame support effort.
There are no consumer HD media today that doesn't use compression, so you must be a seriously bothered individual.
The forums are a place to share information; they are not just a place to come and complain. This forum and its members have done a lot to help other users improve their service quality and answer questions on the nuts & bolts of how thing work and the technology behiind the system.
You are doing the trolling (with a whopping two post under your belt), and it's not welcome.
No, I do not work for the cable company. I would never work for one of these greedy telecom companies.
Of course every signal must be compressed to an extent, but from what I see in side by side comparison is a huge difference in quality. I don't think any one of us are "bothered" individuals either. We see an obvious quality issue in an HD signal that we pay extra for.
Posting things like adjusting TV settings and crushing blacks and details is fine and dandy. But, I prefer to let potential new customers know what they may be getting themselves into and existing users know they are not alone. I think most people have well calibrated TVs and telling them to crush their blacks to hide compression is unacceptable.
BTW, I have a few hundred posts on U-verse Users. No troll here. Talk to InMo about that. 
SomeJoe7777 wrote:
btm73 wrote:
Posting things like adjusting TV settings and crushing blacks and details is fine and dandy. But, I prefer to let potential new customers know what they may be getting themselves into and existing users know they are not alone. I think most people have well calibrated TVs and telling them to crush their blacks to hide compression is unacceptable.
While it is noble of you to try to "warn" all potential new U-Verse customers about the HD quality, I think there's already approximately 7 zillion posts on this forum already that purport to do that. An additional few from you will not make any difference one way or another.
I completely disagree that most people have well-calibrated TVs. I would estimate that less than 10% have proper brightness, contrast, hue, tint, and sharpness adjustments. I would estimate that less than 0.5 % have proper gamma and grayscale linearity adjustments. Contributing to this are manufacturer's default settings which are always wrong, and U-Verse's HDMI connection that has a bug that makes it impossible to get a correct calibration on the majority of TVs.
If adjusting brightness downward slightly to hide compression artifacts is unacceptable, then what is your realistic solution? You remind me of our representatives in Washington --- this is wrong, that is wrong, and this other thing is wrong, yet you have no actual solution of your own.
I guess it's what pool of U-verse customers you are talking about. I strongly disagree that "less that 10%" of U-verse customers who seek better quality HD do not have well calibrated sets. If you are talking U-verse customers on the whole, maybe. Remember, these are videophiles commenting on the HD issues, not your everyday user.
As for a realistic solution, I think that is for AT&T to decide. There have been possible solutions posted over and over on this forum and Uverse Users (up the bit rate, FTTH, etc). But, I doubt any of those people are actually engineers at AT&T and are just assuming those updates alone would solve the issues. Even if they implemented those updates, wouldn't they just use the increased bandwidth to cram more and more features and channels in anyway? 
btm73 wrote:I guess it's what pool of U-verse customers you are talking about. I strongly disagree that "less that 10%" of U-verse customers who seek better quality HD do not have well calibrated sets. If you are talking U-verse customers on the whole, maybe. Remember, these are videophiles commenting on the HD issues, not your everyday user.
As for a realistic solution, I think that is for AT&T to decide. There have been possible solutions posted over and over on this forum and Uverse Users (up the bit rate, FTTH, etc). But, I doubt any of those people are actually engineers at AT&T and are just assuming those updates alone would solve the issues. Even if they implemented those updates, wouldn't they just use the increased bandwidth to cram more and more features and channels in anyway?
I definitely would say it's less than 10%. I believe that 90% of people out there have their TVs set on the factory default settings, which are wrong. Factory settings have the hue too high, the sharpness too high, and the contrast too high. Many have the brightness too low as well. Even if you compensate for these things by putting the TV on the "Cinema" or "Movie" mode, which will usually get these things pretty close to correct, then every last one of them still has bad grayscale linearity, and usually a too-high color temperature. Less than 0.5% of people have had the grayscale linearity properly adjusted, because to adjust it properly requires a hardware colorimeter and going into the TV's service menu.
I think your second point is exactly the point I was making -- AT&T is interested in lowering the bitrate and cramming more streams in, not raising the bitrate for quality purposes.
