I can easily see the difference between Netflix "HD" streaming and Blu-ray, with both signals going through the same BD player. And I'm old enough to use bifocals.
Same here, and I have had 6 eye surgeries! The compression artifacts on HD broadcasts are awful and getting worse. I have DISH. for several years, I have used an external hard drive to archive some of my DISH recordings. When you move a recording from the receiver to the hard drive, you get to see how big the file is. when I started doing this a few years ago, a 2-1/2 to 3 hr. movie would take up around 8-9 gigs of space. Now the same movies may take up 3-4 gigs of space. A Blu-ray has a minimum of 25 gigs on a single layer disc and 50 gigs on a dual layer. There's a whole lot of compression going on if the broadcast version of the same film is 8 gigs at most. And the HD broadcasts only put out DD 5.1 sound at best.