What really kills me is that "digital cable" really offers the cable companies a lot more than it offers you -- more efficient use of bandwidth -- yet they want to charge YOU more for it. Comcast should pay ME $10 a month to accept a digital cable box so they can stop transmitting channels in analog (I'm sure they'd love that) and save on the bandwidth.

When I first got my 950 and a nice (though SD) TV, I investigated getting digital cable, not because I wanted any more channels, but because I wanted better picture quality. My picture has snow in a few channels, bleed-through and echos in some other places... not horrible, and not noticable with my old 13" TV, but definitely a problem on a nice TV. I also wanted digital sound, even if it was only 2 channel PCM most of the time.

Well, after a lot of runaround ("Yes of course it will look better") I finally found someone who could tell me that no, channels currently avaialbe as analog are not re-transmitted in digital, so there will be no quality benefit. Only on higher channels which I would never watch anyway. And you don't really get many more channels unless you subscribe to HBO or other premium services, in which case HBO becomes 12 channels instead of 3. And even then, it's primarily a convenience issue, because HBO shows the same shows all month, you just get more choices about time of day.

It would actually be a loss of convenience, to some extent, because some channels would transmit digital audio all the time, some would be digital some of the time, and many would never be digital. So, I'd have to keep switching from coax input to analog and back again.

In short: not worth it. Not even close. When I move into a house or an apartment that faces South, then I'll get satellite. Until then, I suffer along with POAL (plain-old-analog cable) service.

Sorry for the rant.

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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net