ronmarr1, nearly all HD content is compressed. HDTV is impractical uncompressed. Also, cable companies often chose not to recompress what you get with OTA, so you often get the same picture quality with cable as well as OTA. In some cases, cable can beat OTA during the NCAA college basketball tournament in the United States because there are sometimes four basketball games being televised at once. With OTA, the station can only transmit all of them in SD because trying to transmit one HD will starve the bitrate for the other games. The cable company can transmit them all in HD, beating what OTA offers in this case. However, some cable companies do recompress content, sometimes making it look worse than SDTV. This is rotten, and putting up an antenna and having to adjust it constantly is the only alternative because the American satellite companies do not sell HDTV anymore, but HD Lite while calling that garbage HDTV. This is false advertising which I do not like. Basically, this depends on your local cable company, and the division within the cable company. This is because one cable company can own some stellar divisions while owning others that are pure sewage. EDIT: Fix a few things in the beginning.
This message was edited at: 27-03-2008 08:32