MINNEAPOLIS -- When is glorious high-definition not so glorious?

If you ask some cable customers, it's when their systems try to juggle between getting more channels to customers and using up limited cable bandwidth.

Some customers, especially those with high-end plasma, projector and LCD TV sets, are complaining that they are getting less quality than they paid for.

Some cable operators use signal compression to squeeze three digital HD signals into the bandwidth of one analog station. The result can be blocky images with softer images, even for programming produced with HD in mind.

A technology editor for Consumer Reports magazine said the problem is that viewers want more HD channels at a time when many cable and satellite providers are at the limits of their capacity to provide those additional channels.

Satellite operators are able to get around the problem by launching additional satellites to provide additional HD channels to their systems.