Question of the week: has HDTV lived up to your expectations?

[2Cold Scorpio]

I can't really say; I'm still using a non-HD television. When I have seen quality HD programs (the emphasis on quality) on a quality HD television (again, emphasis on quality), I've been impressed. ^_^

[cubiter]

Have a Sony 40 inch. Great picture on Freeview on most (high bitrate channels). My planned route to HD is freesat because I refuse to pay monthly for the privilege. I will do this when a freesat PVR appears. In the meantime, I am looking into a PC card and setting up the dish. I have no experience of satellite dishes etc but after careful research on the web it looks straightforward.

Mind you it replaced a 16 year old fuzzy CRT Panny so it should be good!!

[shaffaaf27]

for me, unless i compare them side by sid ei can see the difference. if i have been watching a footy match on HD then switch to the non HD i can definitely tell, but watching something like matrix on normal tv, and then a week later on a hddvd, to me makes no difference, as i cannot tell. i can tell when comparing, but not when not comparing.

[Karlos007]

i cant say im willing to pony up the dosh for a hd tv feed, but when i have downloaded h.264 720p american tv shows i love the quality. heros for example looks absurdly good in 720p on my tosh wlt-58. not quiet as good on my bravia 46w3000 due to it being a 1080p panel. but after normal div-x / sd programing, 720p spoils you!

[nchester]

I've had two Sky HD boxes for about a year now running on 40" and 32" Sony Bravias sets respectively and I would say the difference is most noticiable when watching live sport, especially football. HD brings back the clarity that I used to have on my old set but with a much larger screen.
The 32" gives an even better picture than the 40" because it has the same 1920 x 1080i resolution squeezed into a smaller area. Now watching sport on say ITV in SD resolutions is a horrible blurry experience on my 40" set, I really don't know how these people with 50" or greater sets get on. DVD's are less of a problem because the quality is so good to begin with so it upsizes well, hence I'm in no rush for blu-ray, plus I think the disc are too expensive!

The main issue is content i.e. not enough of it. The BBC have had their station running for over a year, yet it's still in a preview stage with very little content, whereas Channel 4 seem to be showing all programmes in HD though I could be wrong. ITV have launched an HD station, but its only available on Freesat at present and I'm not sure whether they are going to put it on Sky any time soon. Other than a couple of documentary channels there's no signs of any other broadcasters coming on stream with HD soon.

The other thing that concerns me is there doesn't seem to be any standard around what qualifies as an HD broadcast. It's fine having a resolution of 1920x1080 etc. but unless the bitrate is of a reasonable standard the quality is going to suffer. Sky HD films for example are nowhere near as good as blu-ray. It would seem quite easy for a broadcaster to sell an HD channel with a very low bitrate. For example, though not HD, I find ITV's broadcast on the Sky platform is horrible and better on terrestrial digital.

Finally, I've read the japs are already demonstrating Ultra High Definition TV with x4 the resolution of HD and also have another version many times higher than that. Apparently it can enduce motion sickness (now that is real interactive TV) but I don't expect we'll see that in Blighty anytime soon!

[Funkstar]

I haven't watched any HD footage outside of electrical stores.

Over the next couple of months I plan on replacing my 42" SD plasma with a 50" full HD set and upgrading my HTPC to handle HD-DVD playback. Already got about 120 HD-DVDs, purchased cheap over the last couple of months, so once I do upgrade I'll have a nice amount of content to view

[pauldarkside]

Upgraded to a 40" Samsung and Sky HD back in January and haven't looked back.

The panel isn't Full HD but uses that weird resolution which falls between 720 and 1080 - since I thought I'd be watching quite a bit of SD content (with 600+ DVDs) it was a compromise. As it happens, the majority of my DVD collection upscales quite nicely and the number of TV broadcasts I view in SD are few and far between.

Sky's £10 monthly premium did seem expensive but after watching the likes of Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Lost, etc I wouldn't want to downgrade; channels like Ruch HD, FX HD, Nat Geo, etc help too!

I ended up plumping for the movie package last month and I'm still impressed by the difference in quality; Curse of the Golden Flower (no, not Shower) although overly long for the story it tells is jaw-droppingly gorgeous - so much detail and vivid colour that my eye's would have popped had it been any longer.

[Mike Fishcake]

I can now only watch full 1080p programmes (via Popcorn Hour media tank) If I find myself round at someone else's house and they try to make me watch lo def (720 downwards) I become nauseous and have to leave.

Oh you poor, poor thing. Fancy those people MAKING you watch their INFERIOR tellies. I'm sure they're really disappointed that you have to leave because there's a smaller amount of pixels than you've become acclimatised to.

Maybe they've actually got 1080p TVs but they just dig their old SD sets out when they know you're coming round.

[jamiecockrill]

I have V+ and the only HD channel I seem to have at the moment is BBC HD. The HD movies are great and equally, the HD movies I've downloaded on my Xbox, using their live service, have also been brilliant. My worries with that are that Virgin might start throttling my connection as each movie is ~4GB and I also only have a 20GB HDD for my Xbox and thats a massive chunk of the space! (The fact that MS seem to like charging £1 per GB for each of their Xbox HDD's is another discussion ).

While it's great, I only really notice it on sport and it's just, well, nice rather than revolutionary. The quality of the picture over SD for V+ (with an HDMI cable) is a million times better than my old standard V box with a SCART connection.

It'd be nice if there were more channels than just BBC HD as their programme schedulers seem to think we like watching old crap gardening/cookery programmes whenever there's not a massive sports event going on. Where's Top Gear HD?

[Skinleech]

I have 2 HD sets; a 50" 720p tv and a 1920x1200 24" monitor. Both are hooked up to HD capable PCs. The 50" had HD-DVD and BD capability and the 24" has an HD-DVD player hooked up to it, with an HD-DVD/BD combo drive getting added to the HTPC soon.

I don't have any form of broadcast HD, though I have had access to some recorded content from BBC-HD, Sky HD (Sky 1 and the movie channels) as well as Permier HD in Germany and US TV broadcasts, and from a quality point of view, yeah, it's impressive stuff, far superior to the low bitrate kak on Freeview. Personally I find that bluured and smudgy even on a non HD set.

The UK implementation could be far better, channels are limited, and that needs to change. However, on the flip side 99% of American HDTV uses mpeg2, not mpeg4, and is not only bitrate starved but many TV shows have large and ugly splash screens over the images.

We get these things relatively logo free in comparison.

Much like a few users in this thread, I have several HD-DVD & Blu-ray disks, and I'd not go back. I have no problem watching DVDs, and my EP-30 does a great job of upscaling to 1080p, but seeing as most BD disks are now released at the same time as the standard def counterpart, I'll choose hi-def every time.

It's not just a visual thing, the htpc hooked up to the 50" tv is connected via analgue to the 5.1 system, so I can experience the full uncompressed PCM/TrueHD/DTS-HD MA soundtracks which can sound fantastic.

[Howard]

I have an HD capable media PC as well as a HDDVD and BluRay player, and V+ for what little HD content it has, and love it. I'm not bothered by watching standard def content though. It just makes the switch to a HD feed look better

[ACiD303]

Whilst I can tell the difference between SD and HDTV (and not owning any HD capable equipment besides my PC) particularly in games, movies and sports, I'm not really fussy. Obviously, HDTV is more enjoyable, but I've done without it for so long that I'm not really ready to upgrade until it is the norm or until it's become much more accessible.

One thing that nags me though is that if I buy an XBOX 360 or a PS3, then I wouldn't want to be playing it on an SDTV as I feel it's wasting potential (and I've played them on SD and HD)....which would thereby force me to upgrade.

Another problem is that I still love CRT image quality, so I don't really want to upgrade to a HD flat panel !!!

[Parm]

I'm actually quite surprised at how few people actually have HDTV broadcasts. I thought the figure might be low, but not quite that low.

Personally, I've had a 50in HD Plasma screen for a few years now, and I've yet to get a HDTV service. SkyHD's monthly subscription was enough to put me off that, I can't get Cable, and Freesat doesn't yet have any DVR boxes available.

I'd like to get HD, but I'm not really in a hurry. Just waiting for FreeView to get some HD channels. Here's hoping it'll all be in place for the 2010 World Cup.

If I had one regret, it'd probably be the 50in Plasma. It's a Pioneer and cost an arm and a leg back in the day, but SDTV looks worse than on an older 40in DLP. Watching upscaled DVDs on it is great, but I don't do that often enough to warrant the screen itself. HD Gaming from the Xbox 360 is fab, but the fear of screen-burn made me move the console to a 32in HD LCD.

[Ciber]

The thing about HD is that I can't see anything wrong with the picture on my 32" CRT and freeview digital. Not so that I want to spend £500+ on kit and extra on movies or a sky HD subscription. Plus so much isn't HD yet. I know once I've had HD for a time everything else will look rubbish, so seeing as most TV isnt available in HD and so many fims I want to watch aren't I'm going to be less happy overall.

[Bluecube]

I've had an HD TV for a good few years now and the only HD material I've watched is my 360 games! I bought the TV for it's size as HD was a bonus at the time. I was damned if I was paying a Sky tax of £50 a month just to watch cr*p TV in hidef!

In all seriousness, I've yet to be wowed by any HD material. Sure it's a tad sharper than SD but not enough for me to think WHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEE! I personally think it's another scam along the lines of Nicam Stereo in order to sell new TVs to the populace. Few folks have TVs big enough to appreciate HD as it is.

[neonplanet40]

I've had an HD TV for a good few years now and the only HD material I've watched is my 360 games! I bought the TV for it's size as HD was a bonus at the time. I was damned if I was paying a Sky tax of £50 a month just to watch cr*p TV in hidef!

In all seriousness, I've yet to be wowed by any HD material. Sure it's a tad sharper than SD but not enough for me to think WHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEE! I personally think it's another scam along the lines of Nicam Stereo in order to sell new TVs to the populace. Few folks have TVs big enough to appreciate HD as it is.

Xbox 360 games are upscaled to 1080p. So they arent "True HD". If you want true hd watch a bluray then make a judegement. I notice a huge difference over SD matierial.