Gizmodo
The State of the Union address last night was a snoozer, but we HDTV gearheads had fun jumping between the networks, checking out which net was able to deliver the best HDTV signal from lens to screen. This was a notable occasion, because all the networks were using precisely the same feed—the same cameras, same everything—where the only difference was between the Capitol pool feed and the viewer.
We took an HD gander at NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and HDNet, to see who delivered the crispiest, most colorful and most gorgeous HDTV signal of all.
For our eyeball test, we looked at a typical array of HDTV stations on our Samsung 1080p reference monitor, delivered via Time Warner Cable in the medium market of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sure, some of the differences might be in the local transmitters, but this is a pretty good representative sample of HDTV content delivery in the US circa early 2007. We took some pictures, all at the same F-stop and shutter speed, and along with those are a few value judgments.
NBC
This picture had a bit of a green tint—notice W's hair looking a little green. The overall sharpness of the picture was just medium compared to the others. There were a few more compression artifacts noticeable in the moving areas, and the sound was rather tinny, with a little too much boost in the midrange for my taste. Grade: B
Fox
This can't be HDTV. In fact, it's not. This is just a widescreen feed, and looked quite blurry compared to the others. Nevertheless, the colors looked more saturated than in the other feeds, and the sound was quite good as well. Grade: D-
ABC
ABC was riding its video levels on the hot side, and its feed appeared to have more of a green cast to the naked eye. It was also not quite as sharp as its competitors, and there were noticeable edge compression artifacts. Besides that, the compression was generally good, and the sound was about equal to the others. Grade: B-
HDNet
This was one fine-looking feed, and would have won this battle had there not been some sort of weird edge enhancement evident throughout the broadcast. It appeared that W's image had been cut out and placed over the background. The sound from HDNet was very good, though. Grade: B+
CBS
This feed gets the nod for the overall best-looking picture we received. There were a few visible compression artifacts, and the sharpness and contrast were slightly better than all the others. Plus, the sound was the most balanced and distortion-free of all the examples. Grade: A- The winner!
Except for that lame-looking feed from the local Fox station, all the HDTV pictures during the State of the Union address last night were good-to-excellent from our Midwest vantage point. If not viewed in rapid succession, it would have been extremely difficult to tell the difference between them.
It was a telling exercise nonetheless, where I found myself wishing for no compression artifacts at all. We can only hope for that in the not-too-distant future.
How about you, readers:
Comments
is it possible that the fox news channel wouldve had a better feed than your local one?
i like pelosi and cheney's lack of facial expressions...
Cool feature, Charlie! I've always found CBS to have one of the best HD feeds here in NYC via TWC as well.
I think CBS should have the best feed merely because they have no sub channels in my locale (San Francisco). All the other stations have sub channels with my ABC (7-1, 7-2, 7-3) having the most which probably results in higher compression and degrades the quality of all the feeds.
I've spoken with someone at KQED (mine has sub channels 9-1 through 9-5), and he claimed that 9-2 through 9-5 have higher compression to fit in 9-1, the primary HD channel.
Pelosi constant blinking in HD kinda freaked me out. I could also see the puppet strings attached to GW with HD.
Wait, so does the compression come from NBC, CBS, etc...or form the cable co compession the signal then sending it out so that they can get in high speed internet, basica cable, digital cable, and HD cable into your house via one line?
CBS looks greener than a couple others and still walks away with an A-? I guess my eye isn't as naked as others.
I don't have as a discerning eye as the reviewer, but I agree.
Last night I did the same thing in the DC area, using a Comcast QAM HD signal on my Mitsubishi 37" 1080P LCD TV, and my results were similar. Fox was clearly SD, I couldn't really tell a difference between ABC and NBC, but something about the picture on CBS made me think it was the best.
Nice to know that I'm not the only lame person comparing the HD quality of channels.
lol. Very cool little experiement Gizmodo. I love FOX's crappy rip off claiming to be "HD". It looks horrible. Someone needs to go down there and rip them a new one for trying to put a pass at us HD intensive americans!
We were watching last night (TW in NYC) and were doing the same comparison just out of curiousity and came to the same conclusion. CBS was definitely she sharpest image albeit with a little deathly green tint.
So does Weber wear a toupee? We were trying to figure that out afterwards. Alas, some things even HD can't help you with.
The compression comes from the cable/Sat feed you use. My comcast feed has artifacts on non-hd content, the bastards.
I couldn't really vote since I half listened to the babble and didn't even watch it in HD.
I think CBS should be smacked with at least a B because of the gaudy giant graphics at the bottom of the screen.
In the SF Bay Area, the best HD signals are, by far, the over-the-air broadcast signals. The HD channels delivered via Comcast are much worse, with compression artifacts and color balance problems.
One thing not noted in the review -- when NBC left the pool audio at the end of the speech (moving to their own commentators), the audio got TERRIBLE - it sounded like a bad VoIP line.
Doesn't *design* matter in the experience?
ABC wins for the best station ID along the bottom.
What good is CBS' awesome picture if they take up a quarter of it with their annoying, constantly animating, undulating ubergraphic?
Isn't it possible that HDNet's picture was so sharp that it actually revealed that Dubya is a cardboard puppet being controlled by Cheney?
ANYONE NOTICE PELOSI MAKING A CONSCIOUS EFFORT TO HIDE HER HIDEOUS NEW VENEERS?? THEY'RE AS BIG AND WHITE AS MATT DILLON'S CHARACTER IN SOMETHING ABOUT MARY!!
I live in Appleton, WI. The problem with your Fox HD is Time Warner Cable. Time Warner and Fox haven't come to "terms" on a deal, therefore TWC customers out here don't get Fox HD. If you have an antenna or ASTC tuner you may be lucky enough to pick up Fox HD over the air.
This test would also be dependant on your carrier and how many HD channels they're providing over their bandwidth. For instance, Dish Network is known for it's "HD Lite" content, which should be full HD but due to the ginormous bandwidth required they throttle back all the stations.
The true test would be HD OTA (over the air)
Last night I set up my new LG LCD TV and using QAM watched the State of the Union on Fox (local affiliate not the News Channel) as my "test". I have Comcast in the Philly Suburbs. Man I was so po'd. I thought my TV was a lemon. Blocky and poor quality image the entire time. I had not tuned all channels last night so I will have to check out the other feeds tonight.
Brilliant work this. Also I can rest a bit easier knowing that the omnipresent green cast to many OTA HDTV programs is not just in my head or a consequence of buying a cheap(er) HDTV.
"undulating ubergraphic" :lol:
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was going insane by Pelosi's constant blinking. Halfway though it looked like she was trying to get something out of her front teeth. I just wanted to slap her and tell her to sit still and stop blinking!
On subject, cool idea to test out, I watched it in HD last night too on NBC.
I voted HDNet as it was the only channel to not have the screen plastered with logos and text telling the viewer what he's watching (as if he didn't already know) :)
Coulda done without that closeup of a cro-mag looking Condi Rice during last night's festivities. Yikes. Reminds me of the several near-strokes I had this year when NBC would cut to Andrea Kremer without warning during one of their Sunday Night NFL HD broadcasts. Fun game you can play with your friends though: pass the remote around your living room and, using the pause button, see who can capture the most alarming HD Kremer.
CBS's HD picture quality is consistently pretty amazing, which always makes me wish CSI (the original) wasn't the only show on the network that I like. At least it bodes well for this year's Super Bowl...
isnt the reason fox looks crummy in comparison becuase they send 720p?
as far as the comment about OTA being the best way to compare, there can be just as much compression on OTA stuff (locally NBC sends an HD, SD, and an SD channel of the CW on one channel, another broadcaster sends 4 SD on one channel.) as there is on cable. OTA would be good, but make sure there isnt multicasting happening on the same RF band.
Perhaps the green cast is your set not correctly calibrated? One channel, I'd blame the source... 2 or 3, however...
Also, realize that there are too many variables between the originating signals and your set. Different satellites, different signal procs at your cable head-end (or broadcast towers) all could mean different results in the end.
Except for Fox. Were they saving up that bandwidth for Idol?
Another great example of this was watching the Bears-Saints game on Fox followed by the Pats-Colts game on CBS (all on a 200-somthing hd projector)
the difference was stunning
I thought I was the only one exhibiting this psychotic OCD-ish behavior. Good to know that I have company. ABC had the best feed. CBS and NBC were pretty close. Didn't bother with Fox. Provider is Time Warner cable in Southern California.
It has as much to do with the hardware your local affiliate uses as it does the network feed...while the networks may all have had the same cameras, the affiliates are all using different hardware and are going to vary in picture quality from market to market.
The Condi stare was scary, I wasn't sure why they focused on her for so long, nor McCain staring down for a good minute.
It's nice that Cox gives the local HD channels for free over basic cable, watching football games in HD is really amazing compared to SD.
Fox is very clear at the beginning of the program if it is being presented in High Definition or Widescreen (which I suspect is only 480p, or perhaps even 480i).
As for the reason of using the two different formats, I can only speculate that is has to do with their adoption of the 720p standard for HD programing. The fact that ABC also uses 720p, however, blows holes through that theory.
Nevertheless, HD nuts can be assured that Fox wasn't trying to pass that substandard signal as High Definition.
As it's always been said, politics is Hollywood for ugly people. HD doesn't help.
It was not a snoozer in the least. You just have to pay attention instead of flipping channels testing signals.
Did anyone pick up on the health insurance tax credit? Essentially, you'll get a $7500 tax credit next year for health insurance. Subtract from that what you pay for health insurance. On the remainder, you pay income tax on in '09. Don't know for sure, but I believe that it will end pre-tax contribution for health care, as well.
Fox News would not have had a clearer signal-- all their stuff is still in SD. Maybe they had a separate feed for the main Fox network in HD--maybe not.
Your comparison isn't as accurate as it seems it would though, because regardless of how the networks are handling the signal, the individual stations also reduce the quality somewhat, then when it's send to the cable company, they squish it down even further. Most of the HD I watched in central NJ a few weeks ago while visiting relatives looked decent, but especially the Philly local stations had horrific compression artifacts.
I do find it curious that CBS' lower third graphic seems to be stretched. Normally their special reports are done out of control room 47 (same as Evening News), which hasn't had a major overhaul in about 20 years, and still has an analog Grass Valley switcher.
i ran my own interesting test last night. i wanted to watch the state of the union online rather than turning on my tv. i started at nbc.com but they didn't support my mac. next was abc.com and i couldn't get anything from them. then i went to cbs were i finally got a video going but i could not download it fast enough. the player head kept catching up with the download so it wasn't really streaming at all. after nearly giving up i went whitehouse.gov and got a live feed with absolutely no problems.
does that scare anybody else?
NFL fans know the Fox can do better. Their HD NFL broadcast has always looked better than CBS. (Seriously, are you guys sure you got the right feed?)
Something tells that this is a vast left wing conspiracy. The liberal media is just trying to make FoxNews look bad. Or is FoxNews trying to help out Bush by making it difficult to see how dumb he looks in HD?
I want to meet the 39 (when I checked) people who voted for Fox as the best picture quality. I suspect they would have a very different interpreation of the State of the Union speech, as well.
Is it me or does Pelosi look like she's got alien eyes in the 1st pic?
This all sucks - CBS is the only network my local cable co. doesn't provide in HD. Boy am I going to be having fun Superbowl Sunday.
Too bad the CBS commentary was so horrible at the beginning of the speech. Katie Couric...ugh. Once she stopped talking, I could finally enjoy the picture.
Everyone here does actually understand the press pool, right? There aren't 5 or 6 network cameras in there, there's only 1. For events like this, networks take turns being the one film and then split signal off to each other. At the next big event, the network filming will rotate to another broadcaster until they've all had a turn, then it repeats. Whoever provides the camera that night has a distinct advantage over the other networks. There is the real posibility that the host network isn't providing everyone else with 4:4:4 uncompressed video. It may be 1920x1080 (or more likely 1440x1080), but it very well could have already undergone compression by the time its delivered to the rivals. The host network may be taking a direct digital feed from the camera and providing the other stations with analog signal. There's a whole host of dirty tricks and passive agressive behavior that happens at these kinds of events, so I think that makes your comparison invalid. The host network will always have an advantage in these situations. I don't know who was providing it last night, but it was ABC in 2004, NBC in 2005, CNN in 2006. Chances are that they weren't providing it last night. Based on that info, take a wild guess who was probably providing it last night.
This doesn't take into account that your satellite or cable provider may be playing favorites and giving a bandwidth edge to one station over another.
dancm2000 is right, FOX NFL in HD has always been better than CBS... i'm on time warner in LA, and i swear CBS had been passing off a 480i signal tops until last 2 weeks NFL games.
ABC should get honorable mention for their consistently good signal too.
I am more interested in a OTA or satellite feed compare-o. I think all the HD stuff on cable sucks. Back in the day I had VOOM with a OTA tuner. This was the best HD ever and that was years ago. I got rid of it before they died though because I couldn't get FOX at all.
I also live in Milwaukee. Charlie, ever put together a meet-up?
i was too busy wishing for a quick death to compare picture quality.
did all of you people (wisely) have the audio muted!?
They broadcast either at 720p or 1080i. that is going to effect this. Also all of you who bought a 1080p to view TV broadcast...your going to be waiting a long time. NO ONE Broadcast at this.
Dick Cheney in high-def: you can see the burning coals of hell blazing in his eyes. And when GWB turns his head, you can look in his ear and see light coming from the other side.