From William Donelson
Despite research that suggests that half of Britons will not switch to
digital TV, the British government intends to end analogue broadcasts in 2010
(18 March, p 5).
In my experience, digital TV is worse than analogue. First, you create a
system in which signals can be broadcast perfectly, then you compress the hell
out of the video. The result is very poor quality TV, in complete contradiction
to the purpose of going digital.
Perhaps compression will improve, but the demand to deliver more channels at
least expense will always push broadcasters towards the cheapest solution. My
bet is that the current batch of bad artefacts—such as “compression
halos”, loss of texture (with grass, bricks and so on), shifty images (shadows
moving against stationary objects) and more—are not going to go away.
Wimbledon
