Your opinion on the set-top box.

Here in the states you need to use the box the cable provider offers.

Digital video signals from either your cable service, computer or DVD player are limited to what the original recording offered for image and sound fidelity.

So as an example the movie Kill a Mocking Bird was shot mostly in 70mm Black and White and some wide shots where shot in 35mm. To digitize the film each frame needed to be digitally mastered and any emulsion defects cleaned up (scratches, stains, etc…). But the biggest limiting factor is the grain of the silver halide crystals of the film stock. Different film stock will has different sized crystals and the processing of the film also is a factor. So the given frame maybe in fact very grainy! So the previous and following frames are often digitally merged to sharpen the given frame and this is done throughout the film as its digitized. Wow what a process!

Now let’s look at an originally shot digital film Once Upon a Time in Mexico What was the first full-length feature film shot completely with digital cameras? unlike film, the detector within the camera is the bigger factor! Older films like this one have large pixels unlike todays films which have shrunk pixels to almost to 1/4 of the width of a hair! In addition the size of the detector has a big impact. The smaller detectors used originally had a lot of bleed-over and the larger detectors where slow in response. Todays detectors are both larger and the bleed-over problem has mostly been solved. Here again the images are often processed color correction and smear are fixed.

Depending on how the source recorded it is then sent across the to your TV the image and sound recorded digitally is exactly as it was captured. So a BluRay recording maybe no better than the DVD recording! As the source (as in the case of Kill a Mocking Bird & Once Upon a Time in Mexico can’t offer more image data than what was recorded. Even still some 4K content was lost! 20 Years of Movie Titles were filmed in 4K and nobody bothered to save them

So as well can see the source and of the content has a bigger impact than the cable box! And the ability of the TV or monitor and its size would be the next issue on how good the image looks.