or whats reasonable to demand from your cable/satellite? should all channels be crystal clear or is that impossible? I've got cable and some channels (especially local channels) are not giving me a really good picture...so i'm just wondering if its just me who's picky or is this just the way it is?
oh and does dish/direct tv have better picture quality than cable?

The sat services use the same local channel feeds that cable uses, so quality will be similar. In general, the quality on satellite is better than cable. Although digital cable can be comparable. For locals, especially HD locals, the quality will always be better from an off-air antenna than from cable or sat unless you live in a fringe area.

All providers over-compress their digital signals and the effects are obvious. MPEG-4 is becoming more common with the sat services, and tends to be less objectionable when over-compressed, but results do vary.

You can be a picky as you want, but the service providers will always try to cram as much content into their available bandwidth as they can.

Use Monster cables, that might make a big difference, and make sure the cables are snug.

monster coax cables? you mean monster composite cables to connect my cable box to my tv right? i thought monster cables were a myth lol that they didnt give any better picture? i have some red/white/yellow (those arent composite or component cables...or what its called?), they're really thick so i guess they're better than the el'cheapo cables...but when i connected my cable box to my tv the sound was really low, the sound with the coax was alot higher

Yes.

I've only sat, no cable. I need no cable, have some thousand channels if I want.

The point is, not only the source/content quality is important, but also the equipment at home used. Receiver, cable, tv.........

just curious, but what type of cable goes from the satellite to your satellite box...is it coax? if it is...wouldnt it be better to use something else since coax isnt all that good of a cable?

i just thought of something...RG59 and RG60, should it matter which of these types of coax i have in my house...i read that the RG60 is better?

If you're getting a good signal strength at the receiver, then it makes no difference at all.

RG6U is used for sat never RG58U which is used for like CB, RG6U is 75 ohm and RG58U IS 50 ohm. For HD TV Dishnetwork has DTV by the pants...DTV equipment is junk compared to dish IMO.

Signal strength is not all, but a good start.
Make sure you use good koax-cable, like that with 110db shielding.
I also use Twin-mini-koax and Quad-mini-koax from the LNBs to the MS/switches, that works too, even they only have 90db.

well i had the cable guy over, he tested the signal strength etc and said it was perfect...i guess i'm just too picky...he said channel 4-80 or something was not digital and the channels that i said didnt look good at all was local channels that they didnt receive from satellites...i said the picture quality looked good at other peoples houses...and he said that might be because their tv have different receivers and converts the signal different. The local channels that didnt look good looked like a BAD vhs recording