Here at Dvice we have been reporting how cable TV services are compressing their HD signals to squeeze more channels down their skinny pipe. This type of signal degradation is pretty easy for someone with a trained eye to pick up with it's blocky artifacts and grainy images, but judging the color fidelity is much harder. Most cable providers don't have a habit of showing color bars and gray scales on a regular basis, so you're usually stuck with making a subjective judgment call.

The optimum way to do this is to have two full HD images side by side under identical conditions, and recently I was able to achieve this during a visit to my friend Jeremy Kipnis' stunning Kipnis Studio Standard home theater. Flipping around the HD channels on his Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box, I came across Casino Royale playing on Cinemax HD, and everything looked wonderful on his enormous 18' x 10' screen. Remembering that I had brought the same movie on Blu-Ray disc, we synchronized the two images side by side, feeding both directly to the projector via HDMI. Because the KSS uses a Sony 4K projector with a native resolution of 4096x2160, we were able to project two 125" diagonal 1080p images in full resolution side by side.

To our amazement, the Cinemax signal that had looked fine without a comparison, now appeared washed out and with a strong magenta cast next to the Blu-Ray. Whether the problems were with the source, Cinemax's output, Cablevision's signal, or even the cable box is hard to determine, but it's clear that cable signals are not handled with the same care used for Blu-Ray mastering.

Kipnis Studio Standard