HD & Dish Network VS HD & Direct

[scoobyxj]

Opinions? Planning on a one room system, and about 200 channels with DVR, and HD. I've had SD Direct before, no problems, but Dish just seems like the better choice now. Especially with the HD.

[Rev Den]

DISH.


:D


Rev

[RichP]

If you are into sports go direct, entertainment dish, I've had both. Or better yet just do both though the direct is kind of a clunky with HD. Also stick up an normal antenna and see what HD channels you get for free 'over the air', you might be surprised.

[Gerr]

we have dish and it works out pretty good for us

[HaleYes]

I looked into it too scoob. I then realized that without a HD television, I was wasting my money. When our current 36"er dies, I'll up grade.

With that said, I was going to go with Dish. Not only would I be supporting Rev, but I've always been happy with my service from them in the past. I inquired about just paying Currie directly to just skip the middle man stuff....they had no idea what I was talking about.

Hale

[scoobyxj]

Both my parents, and my grandparents have Dish. No one seems to have much trouble out of them. My father had some issues with a SD basic receiver, but they got it straightened out in a fair time. My biggest question is in the HD side of it. As in how good is the pic, does it pixelate out all the time, frames freeze? I've got Time Warner now, and quite frankly it about half sucks. Not to mention all the problems I have with my broadband through them. (God I hope I will be able to get DSL where I'm moving. Dial up is going to suck!)

[87manche]

A few notes:
I've got dish, the first receiver died in 2 days, they overnighted me one, been fine since.

the DVR works well, and it's simple enough that my wife needed no instructions.

My SD picture only flakes out in the heaviest of rain.

regarding the intarweb.
Look into cellular access, it's not terribly expensive, and the latency times are way better than satellite.
verizon and sprint both offer USB modems, so you can plug them into desktop or notebook.
if you want a router, then d link makes a series for EVDO and whatever sprint is using.
DIR-450 is the EVDO box for verizon.takes a PCMCIA card.

[Kendrik]

Both my parents, and my grandparents have Dish. No one seems to have much trouble out of them. My father had some issues with a SD basic receiver, but they got it straightened out in a fair time. My biggest question is in the HD side of it. As in how good is the pic, does it pixelate out all the time, frames freeze? I've got Time Warner now, and quite frankly it about half sucks. Not to mention all the problems I have with my broadband through them. (God I hope I will be able to get DSL where I'm moving. Dial up is going to suck!)

I recently switched from Time Warner Cable to Dish and I've been very happy with the change. I was running a dual-tuner Motorola DCT6412 with TWC and switched to the new DVR622 dual-tuner with Dish. It's an excellent receiver with top-notch response time and software. Picture quality did suffer slightly from cable to Satellite due to the higher compresssion they use, but it's nearly un-noticeable unless you're really looking for it. HD Channel selection is excellent, as well, since Dish absorbed all the old Voom HD channels. Some of them are rather odd (HGTV HD!) but its still nice to have the options. I could care less about sports, so the lack of the NFL packages (the stuff that DirectTV offers exclusively) doesn't bother me at all. I also switched over to DSL at the same time (Elite package, 6MB down/ 768 up) and have been very happy with it relative to my experiences with TWC.

I had the EXACT issues you're experiencing with TWC and its a major part of the reason I switched. I went through 3 boxes with them and still saw bad image drop-out and artifacting. I also seemed to completely lose my signal every afternoon between around 12:30 and 2 PM. I never did figure that one out. I never had broadband issues, however, so I can't comment on that part.

TLDR: Dish is definitely a step up from TWC for HD content.

[RichP]

You can drop your sat picture when something gets inline with the dish and the sat itself, I used to loose it for about 5 min every day when the sun hit the western sky here in PA and got inline between the two. The times would change depending on time of the year too.

I'm still happy with my ReplayTV and my mythTV boxes, I know I will have to make some changes when the cable company goes digital but I'm still getting my brain around the issue so I can plan. I flat out will not give up my ability to connect with dvarchive and pull the mpgs right off the drive on the replay or just ftp the mpg down from the mythtv box, edit it and then burn to disc, I'm actually using the myth box more than the replay mainly because the HD is going, I can hear it, and need to reimage the replay to a larger 300gig drive.