When you turn on a high-definition broadcast, you assume that your TV will come to life with the crispest, sharpest picture imaginable. But the fact is, hi-def doesn't always mean high quality

This is an issue that I have been seeing a lot of in the tech news lately. Basicly HDTV is turning into a scam. Comcast and other companies have been compessing the picture quality so that they can fit more "HD" content through cable lines, which causes lower picture quality. More channels could be a good indication that your cable provider isn't giving you high quality HD broadcasts.

Check out this story by Popular Mechanics.

One of the most important factors in determining picture quality is bit rate, or how much video and audio data is being sent down the pipe for each program. The technology behind digital television relies heavily on digital compression, and the ATSC specifies that digital TV use the MPEG-2 compression standard, which is also utilized by DVDs, although some satellite broadcasters use the more efficient MPEG-4 advanced video coding (AVC) standard. These compression technologies are necessary in order to deliver a large number of channels to consumers. Without these codecs, an uncompressed HD video stream could require as much as 1 gigabit per second of data capacity—that's 52 times the capacity of the average broadcast channel. With compression, the same stream can be shrunk almost infinitely. But compression is often used overzealously, and picture quality suffers as a result

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