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

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A lot has been made of High Definition, but over two years after the first HDTV broadcasts in the UK, has it lived up to your expectations?

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Read more.

I'm on my second HDTV and still haven't watched an HD broadcast.

'Local' HD playback has been nice though, when I can do it... which I can't really, given I run a Linux media PC.

freesat isnt too far away from purchase.. just got a priority at the moment then ill hop on. for movies, games, and even a temp monitor its brilliant though

It's the cost more then anything else which bothers me. HD DVD/Bluray looks to be the way to go.

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Originally Posted by Steve

I'm on my second HDTV and still haven't watched an HD broadcast.

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Same, so far I only use my hdtv's to play blu rays or high def content from my pc.

I watch hi-def content from my PC and Xbox occasionally but I'm not that impressed yet. I downloaded some HD movies from Xbox live but I couldn't see much difference from an upscaled DVD.

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.

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Originally Posted by Salazaar

I downloaded some HD movies from Xbox live but I couldn't see much difference from an upscaled DVD.

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Agreed.
The 360 upscales DVDs to brilliant quality on HD TVs

I only upgraded to a HD TV about 4 weeks ago and while a lot of regular TV does not look like anything special, DVDs and my 360 look great.:)

I've got to say, my feelings on HD are a little mixed.

Whilst yes, it is a sharper picture, and yes, it is nice to have, I personally don't have a lot against standard def stuff on my TV.

The other thing is the price, at £249 for the box and an extra £10 a month, it is an expensive habit, especially considering the limited number of channels.

I'll probably keep it a year, I doubt I'll renew the HD subscription though...

Never watched a HD broadcast completely. What I have seen though it looks decent, it was a footy match on Sky at the time.

On the other hand my new TV does 1080P and I have my 360 set to output at that. Got the HD DVD player today and have to admit, it is absolutely fantastic. Watched the HD version of Order of the Pheonix and the detail is undescribeable!

Also watched the Simpsons off a standard DVD, also put on 300 briefly and it upscales really well. Have a Wharfdale upscaling DVD player and the 360 upscaling is far superior.

I dont have hd broadcast is sky HD is overpriced and quite frankly, just not worth it. Blu-rays look great though which is what true HD is supposed to look and sound like. So maybe you should add this to the article?

I have a V+ box and I use it for the recording function over an HD box, as someone with both HDDVD and BluRay players i love HD content, it looks fantastic at 1080P - the best film I have watch thus far,a dn my girlfriend agrees with me on this, is Transformers.

BBC HD is great for Rugby and Wimbledon, they look stunning in HD :)

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Originally Posted by 1006231255

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.

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What a stupid comment, you get nauseous.... So you never used to watch a television before 1080p came along as it made you nauseous....

DVd players with upscalers are pretty good, but the problem is what people compare this technology with. A cheap DVD with upscaling will be better than a cheapo £30 DVD player without. But if you compare a cheepo DVD player with upscaling to a good £150+ DVD without then theres not really much difference. Then if you compare a £150+ DVD with upscaling to a cheap Bluray and the DVD player is just as good and so forth... Same rule applies to HD TVs.

HD looks fantastic but I think it costs a bit much. I have a V+ box but it only has BBC HD :(

Not strictly have freesat myself but my dad's system with it is most impressive on the new 32" 1920x1080 sony LCD.

Very very impressed by the tuners, but the only downside is that the EPG is absolutely **** with freesat at the moment.

TiG

After being spoiled by HD I now find it annoying watching DVDs and low bitrate channels on Sky, even good transfer upscaled DVDs are barely watchable. Luckily I do have almost 100 HDDVDs in case I get bored though. :)

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. ^_^

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!!

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.

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!

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!

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 :)

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.

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Originally Posted by 1006231255

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.

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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.

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 :angst:).

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?

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.

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 :D

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 !!!

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.

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

My TV is only 720p but I've seen plenty of 1080p demo material playing in the shops and I still think it's a bit so what? As I said, it's good on big TVs (45"+) but wasted on anything less.

For me HD has been great for sport, films and the (mainly) American programming shown on Sky One HD.

However after you have had Sky HD for 6 months you have seen most of what is available on the other HD channels before. There seems to be only a small amount of new HD programming each week (aside from sport/films).

The situation isn't helped by BBC HD still being in "preview" status which means 4-5 hours of actual programs each evening with loads of preview material for the rest of the day.

Also while Channel 4 HD shows the same programs as SD Channel 4, many appear to be upscaled from SD rather than true HD.

Even on my HD Ready 37" screen the better HD material looks superb compared to my old CRT, I just wish there was more of it to watch.

iv seen and played HD material on many different monitors and projectors and i have to say anyone who claims its barely different or not worth it either hasnt seen it or is just being awkward. The image is not just 'sharper' the colours/greyscale are much better defined, the pixels are square (which means unlike standard def the widescreen res is real widescreen not streched sd), progressive scanning alows for a greater variety in production style.

If people actually take the time to consciencly think about what they are looking at on the screen and actually appreciate it instead of blowing it off as 'another fad' i think you might realize how much the entire viewing experience changes.

Programs are actualy being made differently now that so much more can be captured. Producers, drectors, camera operators, vision engineers, set designers, actors and ESPECIALLY make up artists are all having to learn new techniques to both cope with and utilize HD at its full capability.

Find someone who has a HUGE HDTV or projecter preferably, walk up to the screen and look at the image. Backgrounds have now become extremely explorable; the added detail means that you can see every blade of grass with a complete range of greens wheras before it was just a big green mush. Anyone who has watched HD lost will know what i mean here!

Anyone who hasnt got or experienced a HD tele you think you havent benefitted from the technology at all... WRONG! HD production then watched on SD televisions looks better than a traditional SD production.

The whole thing about HD is that is better quality images... so if you buy a cheap HD set then the chances are its going to have costs cut and lose out on some of the experience that is HD. This is why i havent yet bought a TV set; i dont have the money for a good quality 1080p television. Im also in question about LCD, whilst the technology has come in leaps and bounds its still not anywhere near as good as CRT in respects of image quality and contrast ratio. I think for an actual televsion i may wait around for OLED and stick to having full HD on my PC.

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Originally Posted by Biscuit

iv seen and played HD material on many different monitors and projectors and i have to say anyone who claims its barely different or not worth it either hasnt seen it or is just being awkward. The image is not just 'sharper' the colours/greyscale are much better defined, the pixels are square (which means unlike standard def the widescreen res is real widescreen not streched sd), progressive scanning alows for a greater variety in production style.

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That's your opinion which you're perfectly entitled to. I still stand by my view that there's naff all difference unless you have a large TV. On a 32" TV sitting at a decent distance (c. 8 feet) there's not enough difference between HD and SD to get excited about.

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Originally Posted by Bluecube

That's your opinion which you're perfectly entitled to. I still stand by my view that there's naff all difference unless you have a large TV. On a 32" TV sitting at a decent distance (c. 8 feet) there's not enough difference between HD and SD to get excited about.

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You can hardly say naff all difference :O_o1: if you honestly cant notice any difference then you need your eyes checking tbh. I agree on screens 32 or less the experience doesnt change a great deal but when the size of a FULL HD image is 4 times that of SD... using the same principle as buiying a cheapo TV being a bit pointless, you kind of eliminate the whole point in it being HD if dont buy something above 32

I'm very impressed with HD. Some sources are better than others though, but I'd hate to be without it now.

I have a lot of free time just now, and I really rate SkyHD. It seems to be a love/hate thing with SkyHD, but even with the lower quality in comparison to Blu-Ray, it's great value for money in my eyes. High def sport almost every day, a range of movies every day, and all the other stuff such as Discovery (and OCC :rolleyes:). For £10 extra per month? Great value in my eyes. Blu-Ray is obviously capable of far better quality, but at a higher price. But with a decent disc, and a decent display, I don't know how people could debate the quality difference between SD/HD.

I think there's an awful lot of confusion surrounding HD in general though. A lot of the time people don't have a clue what they're watching, so you end up with people getting the wrong end of the stick. There's a lot of negativity from people who seem to think that upscaled SD is HD, or that anything shown on a HDTV is HD. A lot of peoples experience of HD is walking into Comet, seeing an distributed SD feed shown on a 1080 LCD, and presuming that's 'FullHD'. Or playing the PS3, hooked up via the supplied composite lead, and thinking they're playing in HD.

Also, a lot of folk who watch it on PC monitors get poor quality, either because their monitor is scaling poorly, or stretching stuff out of the correct aspect ratio.

Another important thing is distance to screen. People often sit too far away to get any real benefit, then complain that they don't see much improvement in PQ. I appreciate viewing distances are often difficult to change, due to home layout etc. but it's a little unfair to criticise something when you're not really giving it a fair chance. People seem to think they need to sit at the same distance as they used to with SD, and that's really not the case. If you have to sit that far away, fair enough, but if you don't, get closer!

The whole 720/1080 thing is a bit silly too. There's people all over the web boasting about only watching 1080, and how much better it is than 720, when chances are they're watching 720 (or lower) upscaled. Just because the TV OSD says 1080p, that doesn't mean it is native 1080p! Even with a 40" TV, most folk wouldn't notice the difference between 720/1080. I have a 55" TV, and from beyond 8ft it's nigh-on impossible to see the difference, so I don't know how folk supposedly do it on a 37" screen from 10ft!

Anyway, sorry for rambling! I love HD, and I'm looking forward to the future of HDTV, 4k2k, Hi-Vision and beyond :eek:

I've seen them in the shops and yes, the picture quality is lovely but to be honest I'm reluctant to shell out for an HD TV when my 32" CRT still has years of life left in it. It's not as if there's much worth watching on TV anyway let alone broadcast in HD.

We've just got rid of our Sky subscription because with the full (non HD) package we were struggling to find anything that we wanted to watch.

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Originally Posted by 1006231255

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.

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You poor thing. How would you have coped in the days of 405 lines black and white?

I can remember (only just) BBC2 starting up. I was about 4. We couldn't get it for ages because you had to upgrade to a 625 lines TV and they were really expensive.

As for colour TV. Wow! We, like a lot of other families, finally got colour TV when Princess Anne got married. You had to have a colour TV for a Royal Wedding.

So the hardship of you having to slum it with a mere 720p just doesn't bring a tear to my eye somehow.

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Originally Posted by Bluecube

That's your opinion which you're perfectly entitled to. I still stand by my view that there's naff all difference unless you have a large TV. On a 32" TV sitting at a decent distance (c. 8 feet) there's not enough difference between HD and SD to get excited about.

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Perhaps when comparing progressive DVD or analogue TV to HD, but broadcast DVB SDTV is dire in comparison to HD content.

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Originally Posted by Steve

Perhaps when comparing progressive DVD or analogue TV to HD, but broadcast DVB SDTV is dire in comparison to HD content.

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Yes, I'll go with that. But some SDTV channels (esp on Sky) are dire in comparison to a Youtube video let along HD :mrgreen:

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Originally Posted by Bluecube

Yes, I'll go with that. But some SDTV channels (esp on Sky) are dire in comparison to a Youtube video let along HD :mrgreen:

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This is true, the amount of compression that is put on everything is completely absurd and quite sickening

HD has completly lived up to my expectations, its not a noticable improvment over SD in an everyday situation.

Sure if you stick HD and SD side by side HD will look a little better, but in real life no one actually cares if Eastenders is slightly more detailed.

Plus if stuff is recoreded in HD and broadcast in SD everyone gets a weird hazy glow, kinda like a soft focus effect, or maybe thats just me being picky

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Originally Posted by TheBloodyNine

Sure if you stick HD and SD side by side HD will look a little better, but in real life no one actually cares if Eastenders is slightly more detailed.

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Thats a very good point, HD only really shines through on specific kinds of show. Action/thriller type shows like lost, heroes and prison break. These all have interesting and sometimes quite unusual scenarios where the extra resolution and colour actually make a difference. Simple things like a soap opera would probably be damaged by HD as the set is vry similar day in day out which would reveal how crappy some of it is.

Sport can benefit massively from HD however the cameras used usually have a much more limited focul range (mainly because the focus is so much more importaint) so to tackle the lesser of two evil in this genre 720p is more practical.

I've had an HDTV since october of last year. Granted it's not a 1080 set, but i've never watched an HD broadcast on it.

I use it to play my 360 and watch DVDs.

Whilst I don't currently use an HD player, I do have a V+ box and a 40" 1080p Samsung. As far as watching HD content, if I watch a movie on Movies on Demand, and it's available in HD, I'll choose the HD version, simply because it's there, and there is a marginal improvement. That said, I don't feel that having watched HD content in any way "spoils" SD. The V+ box does a good job of upscaling, as does my DVD player, and so far that's been good enough. I probably will get an HD player at some point, but it's not that high up on my to-do list.

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Originally Posted by TheBloodyNine

HD has completly lived up to my expectations, its not a noticable improvment over SD in an everyday situation.

Sure if you stick HD and SD side by side HD will look a little better, but in real life no one actually cares if Eastenders is slightly more detailed.

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I'd have to disagree a little there. On most large screen sets, it is a noticeable improvement, to my eyes anyway. I'm sure it's not much different on a 32" set, or if you sit a fair distance away. But on big sets, there's a clear difference.

I agree that very few people give a hoot about Eastenders, but I do give a hoot about sports and movies, and they're far superior in HD :)

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Plus if stuff is recoreded in HD and broadcast in SD everyone gets a weird hazy glow, kinda like a soft focus effect, or maybe thats just me being picky

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Nah, I think that's just you being picky :D An awful lot of broadcast shows are shot in HD, and transmitted in SD. Probably more than most folk realise. A lot of very run of the mill things are shot in HD.

On a few AVForums, the Formula 1 coverage has been mentioned as a great example of SD capability. But it's shot in HD, has been for a while now :)

Sticking to an old CRT as I have, I simply wish the freeview signal was a little better on some of the less mainstream chanels (I've been known to watch ITV4 ) before Freesat and HD was tinkered with.

Speaking of CRT, I can't see anything wrong with the picture on my 32" CRT. All I wish for at the moment like sybarite there is a better freeview signal.