I had Dish Network installed today. I used to have Time Warner cable. TW just went up to $75/mth for non-HD programming. I got HD programming, a pretty similar list of channels for less than $50 in a bundle with my phone service and DSL. So I should save over $25/mth and get HD too.
Installation took most of the day. The installer showed up before 8am (he called first and it was fine with me, I had been up over an hour). He left after 2pm. Most of the coaxial cable in my house - the runs to two of the three TVs - would not support the Dish signal. So we pulled new cable to one of them, where it was fairly easy, and used the one good one to get signal to the other receiver. The last TV is back fed a SD signal that goes on the "bad" cable to that TV. It is an old CRT set so that is OK. Running the new wire took awhile, mounting the dish took awhile (he was able to put it on the screen porch roof where I wanted), running the wire outside the house took awhile. The last time consumer was trying to get the receiver to work with the two CRT TVs it was hooked to (a second receiver feeds my one HDTV). They both work now but Ray, the installer, was running up and down two flights of stairs trying to find channels that would work for the TVs and allow them to see the receiver.
Picture on the HDTV is really nice. All my local network channels are HD as are many others like HGTV, USA, TBS, TNT, Spike and ESPN (and many others). The HGTV is 1080i. The installer says many others HGTV including TW is 720. It doesn't make that much difference watching the evening news but I didn't love loosing the edges of the picture sending a conventional signal to the HGTV and Zooming the image to fill the screen.
Picture on the CRT TVs is same as before, no surprise. One unpleasant surprise is the receivers have no outputs for the coaxial signal my old equipment uses. As a result, my DVD recorder, old DVD player, my son's TiVo, my sons DVD recorder and a VHS player are all sitting unattached. Everything except the TiVo is old and seldom used but I am still not sure I like loosing it. Ray managed to "create" a coaxial signal with splitters but that was part of the problem getting things to work. The TiVo has a component input but wouldn't recognize the signal when we tried using them. Not sure what is up with that. Ideas are welcome.
Jim
Installation took most of the day. The installer showed up before 8am (he called first and it was fine with me, I had been up over an hour). He left after 2pm. Most of the coaxial cable in my house - the runs to two of the three TVs - would not support the Dish signal. So we pulled new cable to one of them, where it was fairly easy, and used the one good one to get signal to the other receiver. The last TV is back fed a SD signal that goes on the "bad" cable to that TV. It is an old CRT set so that is OK. Running the new wire took awhile, mounting the dish took awhile (he was able to put it on the screen porch roof where I wanted), running the wire outside the house took awhile. The last time consumer was trying to get the receiver to work with the two CRT TVs it was hooked to (a second receiver feeds my one HDTV). They both work now but Ray, the installer, was running up and down two flights of stairs trying to find channels that would work for the TVs and allow them to see the receiver.
Picture on the HDTV is really nice. All my local network channels are HD as are many others like HGTV, USA, TBS, TNT, Spike and ESPN (and many others). The HGTV is 1080i. The installer says many others HGTV including TW is 720. It doesn't make that much difference watching the evening news but I didn't love loosing the edges of the picture sending a conventional signal to the HGTV and Zooming the image to fill the screen.
Picture on the CRT TVs is same as before, no surprise. One unpleasant surprise is the receivers have no outputs for the coaxial signal my old equipment uses. As a result, my DVD recorder, old DVD player, my son's TiVo, my sons DVD recorder and a VHS player are all sitting unattached. Everything except the TiVo is old and seldom used but I am still not sure I like loosing it. Ray managed to "create" a coaxial signal with splitters but that was part of the problem getting things to work. The TiVo has a component input but wouldn't recognize the signal when we tried using them. Not sure what is up with that. Ideas are welcome.
Jim
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