Interesting. I've never done a head-to-head so I'm working off memory but I just never felt like there were so many artifacts/blocking on cable/satellite but I'm far from the best person to ask. I still watch old episodes of things that never were released in HD so I'm fine with bad quality for some stuff but when I tried to watch football when I was home for the holidays I kept getting distracted by the image quality. It's more jarring to go from "clear" to "blocky" than to just stay blocky.
