[quote name=\'Particleman\' post=\'127389\' date=\'Aug 14 2006, 04:00 PM\']
I think the quality of most digital channels is worse. That's the whole purpose of standard definition digital cable, to squeeze more channels using as little bandwidth as possible. The cable companies can designate how much bandwidth a channel can take but in most cases, the quality isn't really that good. This combined with the upscaling of my HDTV gives me a picture with noticable artifacts and gritty appearance.
I would like to also say that my cable company, Time-Warner of Raleigh/Durham does have excellent digital HDTV channels. The bandwidth has to go somewhere, I suppose. :-)
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It really depends on the specific MSO. Done properly, an SD digital cable channel will be much cleaner than an equivalent analog channel. Plus, at least in my area, the MSO receives GSN from a digital satellite feed and then transmits it as analog, so I get the worst of both worlds - an over-compressed digital signal with all the noise, interference, and crosstalk of an analog RF signal.
Also, many MSOs take their signal directly from the HITS, without reencoding it. Thus, it's not necessarily the MSO's fault that a particular digital station is low-bitrate. Here, channels like Biography and History International are high-bitrate and sourced from what appears to be either an S-Video or component interconnect (so the image quality is superb), but channels like Nick GAS are much lower-bitrate (and appear to be taken from a composite interconnect, which means that the encoder now has to deal with crosstalk as well as the actual image itself).
My opinion is that MSOs should completely do away with the analog tier, distribute boxes to subscribers at a rate of $1/mo, and then bump the bitrates up on everything (they'd still save on capacity, seeing as you can definitely get 2, maybe even 3 high-quality SD stations into a single 6MHz slot, at a rate of about 7-9Mbps for each stream). Sure, you'd remove the capability for most people to just hook up a cable directly to their TV, but at a rate of $1/mo for a converter, they'd still profit, while the converters would be "cheaper" to the average person (right now, my MSO charges $3.95/mo for a digital converter, and I assume that's roughly average, although I'm not sure). Additionally, image quality would be tend to be much cleaner (especially on channels traditionally found on analog tiers, such as locals), since the channels wouldn't be transmitted to the home via an analog video signal. Sure, this is a pipe dream, but I think it would be feasible.
