Got Comcast

Just got Comcast digital cable, a switch I was forced to make from my trusty Dish Network I was subscribed to for the past couple of years. The reason for switching was a line of sight issue with the dish and satellite at my new apartment.

Comcast has a good line up of stations, but Dish is far superior. I loved having East and West coast feeds of a lot of stations, such as WB affiliates. However, the coolness of the Comcast box outweighs it all. Comcast comes with several high definition channels out of the box! Including: TNT-HD, INHD 1 & 2, ESPN-HD, local channels and a few others.

Even though I do not have an HDTV, I have a five year old 40" 16x9 standard definition rear projector, I find myself watching a lot of HD programming downconverted to standard definition. The picture quality compared to the standard definition feed of the channel is higher: downconverting from a video source that has four times the resolution of an SD channel makes for a near DVD picture, much better than the digital SDTV channels, and way better than SD-analog channels. Plus you get a lot of programming in 5.1 Dolby Digital.

There is one bad thing about Comcast in that they give you the box without a manual. The default settings for the box are to chop the left and right sides of a 16x9 frame off and zoom it to fit a 4:3 TV, including movies that should fit 16x9 wonderfully. I went on the Internet and searched for the manual for my Motorola box, downloaded it and discovered how to set the box to letterbox instead of 4:3. Now all the HD channels come in letterboxed.

Now if only Comcast carried Universal-HD I could see Battlestar Galactica in 5.1!