I have a Dish Network HD DVR and I am very happy with it so far. The HD content available from Dish far surpasses that available from cable. My beef is not with Dish, however, it's with certain HD channels.
TBS has an "HD" channel. I put HD in quotation marks because I have yet to see anything more than baseball and Frank TV actually broadcast in HD. Everything else is not HD even though they claim it is in the program guide. Now, that's not the worst part. Not everything is filmed in HD. I guess they can't get their hands on the HD master for every show they run. That is sort of understandable. What is NOT understandable is the fact that they stretch everything! The Office is a great example of the incompetent knuckleheads over at TBS "HD". The Office, which is filmed in 16:9 HD and broadcast as such on NBC, is shown on the TBS "HD" channel with the letterbox bars (top/bottom) still there! To top it off, they stretch it! What the hell? There is no way to undo the damage. Virtually everything on the TBS "HD" channel is broadcast that way! Why????? It makes no sense and it boggles my mind.
Another example is a show on the History Channel called Shockwave. The first episode I saw looked great. It was broadcast in a normal 16:9 aspect ratio. Every episode since then has been just like The Office on TBS with the bars on the top/bottom and stretched.
How hard is it to AT THE VERY LEAST crop off the letterbox bars so the content on the "HD" channels properly fits a wide screen TV???? Seriously, what idiots are in charge of this?
This has nothing to do with Dish or any other sat or cable company. It's the content provider. They really need to get some competent people to manage their HD content.
Discovery and it's affiliates at least do a little better. They partially zoom 4:3 content so that a small amount of the top/bottom is lost but they do not stretch it at all.
I don't think there is any short answer to your question - all I can say is that from having worked briefly with a company that built television stations (among other things), that the entire industry right now is in such a state of flux, that it may still be a while yet before all this gets sorted out. Many cable companies, and satellite providers are racing ahead of the pack by advertising "HD" content, as a means of drawing in more customers, but in effect they're doing exactly what you describe - letterboxing original 4:3 content and slapping an "HD" suffix onto the channel.
It's even so crazy that the original network letterboxes its own content to make it visible on 4:3 screens, broadcasts it to your local provider, who slaps another letterbox into the format and sends it your way.
It's crazy right now. We're in the midst of the great transformation between old analog 4:3 to digital 16:9. The content you see delivered, of course comes from so many different locations, is compiled by the network (first), then delivered to the satellite (or cable) provider, along with every other network, who compiles this stuff, and rebroadcasts it to the customer (you).
I think the biggest problem is that we have not yet reached an industry standard. Not every show is being filmed in 16:9, so these issues are going to persist - and not every network and/or provider is utilizing the same scaling criteria - and like I said, jumping way ahead of the curve to try to lure in more customers who are enticed only by the catchphrase "High Definition", but who for the most part, don't even know what that truly means.
Eventually all of this will sort itself out, and your HDTV will be doing the job it was meant to do. It's no secret, obviously that the world is discarding the old analog formats and going digital and HD. The industry will be standardized, just as it came to be during the analog revolution, and you'll be fine.
