You may be thinking to yourself that because our television broadcast systems are “digital” that the signal quality shouldn’t need any filtering to remove noise from the picture however…
The TV channels transmitted by satellite, cable and over the air are digitally encoded and compressed in order to get as many channels as they can out to their subscribers. This is called MPEG encoding. The original signal is compressed for transmission and then expanded when it is delivered to your TV. This is not a loss less system. In the compression process a small amount of information is lost, never to be seen on your TV! When your digital TV plays these signals it attempts to fill in the missing pieces of the picture puzzle. How well this is done depends a lot on the quality of the television, but even the best need a little help. Check out the picture controls on your TV and you will probably find a control or two dealing with things like mpeg noise reduction, mosquito noise reduction, block noise reduction etc. Experiment with these controls, they are there because the television manufacturers realize that the mpeg television broadcast system usually needs a little help!
If you are watching a Blu-ray disc on your TV you can usually turn off these filters as the information on the disc is uncompressed.
Enjoy!
The importance of television noise reduction
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