SEMI OT END OF TELEGRAM AGE STOP

Jim Leonard wrote: Both. I can't really comment on what either is like in the US (except to say that the times when I have been in the States I've been amazed at how bad TV picture quality is - possibly that's due to being used to better vertical resolution in Europe). Experience of digital TV (Satellite or cable) or digital radio in the UK though has been that they compress the data so much in order to provide more channels that the resulting picture/audio is far worse than can be achieved with a good analogue TV/radio with a decent aerial setup. Not to mention that said analogue setups seem to cope far better during periods of extreme atmospherics - digital services on the other hand seem to either break up or stop working altogether. There are of course issues of programme quality too (which seems to affect digital TV far more than radio) - as soon as it becomes easy for a service provider to deliver lots of low-bitrate digital channels rather than a few analogue ones, the quality of actual content goes through the floor because they can't be bothered to keep standards up. In the cases where there *are* good shows, they end up being repeated endlessly, and it's only when you stop and think that you realise there are only a few hours of really good content per month out of tens/hundreds of channels. Now paying nothing for all those channels and *only* paying per-programme for what you watch would be nice - but even then only if the provider can deliver at an equal or superior picture to analogue (otherwise I may as well just go to the movies or rent a DVD). There seems to be a common misconception in society that digital services are automagically better than analogue ones - but that's only true if the people providing those services make a commitment to keep standards up. </rant> :-) cheers Jules