In Las Vegas the stations are selling off some of their ATSC bandwidth to USDigital. That would account for the SD pix being poorer than the NTSC. This is a special case. Not the fault of the design specs of the system. I never meant that Digital transmission could overcome downgraded transmission or poor reception. I have gone to the trouble to install a good antenna, on a mast 10 feet above my roof and I get very solid digital reception, as well as excellent NTSC reception. Even on my 42" HDTV plasma the standard definition programs look much better than via the NTSC transmissions. This is partly due to most Los Angeles stations haveing gone to great length to upgrade their plants to accomodate the full capabilities of digital. The system is capable of providing much higher quality pictures than analog, even when viewed on an analog set. As far as the reception problems go, tests here in Los Angeles have shown more locations get better reception on DTT than worse. Terrain features here have meant that many homes were never able to get NTSC signals either. Also those homes in the shadows of huge oil refinery or container crane structures will never get any decent OTA reception. My experience has shown that any change to improve service will result in some locations getting poorer reception. This occurred when we went to circular polarization. Surveys of TV repair shops got overwhelming reports of improved reception, but there were numerous homes that had worse. Cable isn't perfect either. Los Ageles City has gotten so overwhelmed with complaints about poor cable service that the city council is undertaking an overhaul of all the cable franchise terms and regulations. I'd bet that it will prove un-neseccary as competition from satellite spurs the cable companies to improve greatly. Regards, Tony ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.