My two cents about cable: around here it's very good quality, with about 60 analog channels and (if you want) 60 digital channel plus 8 HDTV channels. I just get analog.
For many years I used nothing but an antenna, hooked up to an RG59 system. When I finally broke down for cable (hey, 3 months free with cable internet) I had *horrible* picture quality. Turned out to be the RG59 -- replaced it with RG6 and everything cleared up (except for a hum bar caused by the cable modem, but that's another story).
If you have a lot of components, get a good quality amplifier. I recently replaced my Radio Shack thing with a Channel Plus model -- got rid of a ton of RF interferance. Final tweak for perfect quality was tracking down two "not properly hooked up" radios that were interjecting various problems (one caused a scrolling bar on 27, the other caused RF lines on 21).
Right now the cable signal feeds into over 10 devices and all have absolutely perfect picture quality right throught to channel 85. DSS's idea of local channels can be pretty poor quality in comparison.
