Is HD over the air really this bad?

MX5huggy

bamboozled2 wrote: »

I think it was last summer, (may of been earlier) that it was reported that blu-ray manufacturers had decided to throw in the towel and not go into battle with HD, in a 'this town ain't big enough for the both of us' scenario. They didn't want to go down the VHS/Betamax route.
Then suddenly Blu-ray is more to the fore than HD. Am I the only one who is confused by all this?
We bought a HD ready Tv last christmas, but haven't watched any HD on it yet, as I refuse to pay to watch HD tv.
I have found out that you can watch blu-ray dvds by putting them into an Xbox or PS3 and connecting to your tv with an hdmi cable. (tesco leaflet)
Also, if you put blu-ray dvds in an xbox and watch them on an hd ready tv, will you be watching them in hd quality or do you have to have a blu-ray telly?
Told you I was confused!

You are confused or even Bamboozled!

HD is High Definition you can get different HD sources ie Sky HD Freesat HD and then BlueRay disks and there was HD-DVD was a rival to BlueRay this is what has died last spring not HD! Blueray won and is alive and kicking mainly becaue of the number of blueray players out there in PS3's

maxsquared

bamboozled2 wrote: »

I think it was last summer, (may of been earlier) that it was reported that blu-ray manufacturers had decided to throw in the towel and not go into battle with HD, in a 'this town ain't big enough for the both of us' scenario. They didn't want to go down the VHS/Betamax route.
Then suddenly Blu-ray is more to the fore than HD. Am I the only one who is confused by all this?
We bought a HD ready Tv last christmas, but haven't watched any HD on it yet, as I refuse to pay to watch HD tv.
I have found out that you can watch blu-ray dvds by putting them into an Xbox or PS3 and connecting to your tv with an hdmi cable. (tesco leaflet)
Also, if you put blu-ray dvds in an xbox and watch them on an hd ready tv, will you be watching them in hd quality or do you have to have a blu-ray telly?
Told you I was confused!

It was Toshiba(leading)'s HD DVD format lose their battle to Sony (leading)'s Blu ray battle, so blu ray is the winner and you can still buy/rent them.

Xbox 360 had this plugin drive which allows you to watch HD DVD, as HD DVD lost the battle, the are not making anymore of this, but you can still buy this cheap somehwere online. Xbox 360 itself can't play any HD disks apart from download store.

PS3 indeed can play Blu ray, but you will need to use HDMI, HDMI is a new port for HD content to be transmit from your player to your TV, it contents a encryption so no one can copy the HD content and make pirates (although this had been cracked last year sometime, can't remember when). Without HDMI, your TV only able to output normal standard definition content.

@buglawton depends on where you saw BBC HD and how it's connected together, if it's not via HDMI most definitely it's normal broadcast quality, i.e. 576i same as BBC channel. oppose to if you used a Blu ray player without a HDMI it will output 576p I suggest you check this out first.

About Progressive scan and interlace scan read this too much to explain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_scan

buglawton

I will pop back to Lakes and have another look and ask where the signal is from, maybe the actual proggy showing at that moment was a non-HD one, so not the best way to demo HD!

Simon_B_2

Cat695 wrote: »

£10 to view freesat....erm the name gives it away...FREEsat....you just buy the box and ITV/BBC HD is free

so whoever said its £10 is ripping you off

This thread seems quite confused FreeSat is a free service which makes up part of your license fee (requiring you to have a freesat box and satellite dish) , see link for a good website with lots of info on this.

You pay £10 a month if you have Sky and upgrade to Sky HD.

Also on Bluray a PS3 can play Bluray disc's and games, but a Xbox360 plays HD games and DVD's only.

hpuse

This is an humble attempt to explain in my own understanding.

HD is related to transmission(digital signal, via satellite or freeview), reception(HD digital receiver) and presentation(TV) format. This is similar to PAL/SECAM introduced in the 1980s.
While Blueray, is just another media format burnt into the disc, similar to DVD format or an audio-CD. Blueray has lot of interactive and rich features to display content on any screen. You can watch Blueray in your old CRT TV set because the Blueray disc player can output the standard PAL signal as analogue output. The clarity at its best, is the maximum that your current CRT TV set can afford to display. Mind you, CRT clarity is still far superior to LCD/Plasma clarity, while HD-TV format picture clarity is far superior to a traditional CRT TV, due to its rich defined contents in digital format. For watching HD-TV, you need an HD-compatible TV. LCD and Plasma are ever so popular in the UK but CRT-HD are not, though Samsung tried to introduce it in 2006/2007, but not sure how popular they were, and eventually removed them from their product lines.

For HD, you need a compatible receiver(HD reciever) and a TV that understands the HD output from the receiver (HD compatible TV).

RE: quality of the signals, I do not know, as I don't have a HD TV yet(first I need a job, then money to buy one HD TV . Picture quality should more or less be the same between Blueray and HD, but since HD is transmission-oriented, you need lot of compatible gadgets to view them!. Hope this helps.

Bizzie_Lizzie

I hope you don't mind me butting in with a numpty question - if I had a Shy HD+ box, but a tv that is not HD ready, would I be able to view my tv as per usual? I understand that having an HD ready tv would enable me to appreciate the quality of HD transmitted programmes, but would I still be able to watch HD channels on my old set?

gjchester

Bizzie_Lizzie wrote: »

I hope you don't mind me butting in with a numpty question - if I had a Shy HD+ box, but a tv that is not HD ready, would I be able to view my tv as per usual? I understand that having an HD ready tv would enable me to appreciate the quality of HD transmitted programmes, but would I still be able to watch HD channels on my old set?

Yes.

However they will charge you the extra tenner a month as the box can recieve the HD service (it's not if you can see it it's if the box recieved it) however why you would want to pay more for channels you already have?

Bizzie_Lizzie

Thanks, gchester - actually, it was just an idle query.

rotti1967

Ive just got myself the Humax Foxsat-Hdr i think its good but am disappointed in that there is only BBC HD and a channel called Luxe HD so far, and i thought the likes of Dave/Virgin/SSN would be on like they are on Freeview, but no doubt this is to do with Sky Tv.

Leopard

buglawton wrote: »

Usually I see the Bluray demo DVDs running and apart from some movement flicker that I never notice on my 11 year old CRT TV, they look superb.

Then today I saw in Lakes a demo of a BBC HD broadcast (it even had a "HD Demo" logo showing) . It looked not much better than the old 625 lines and a whole lot worse than Bluray.

Are they any real BBC / ITV Sky HD viewers out there who can give their opinion? This would decide what kind of hurry I should be in to "upgrade".

The BBC HD picture (and also the ITV picture, when it's being simulcast) is stunningly good on a Sony 52" LCD when it's fed from a Humax FoxSat-HDR box - far better than anything I've seen being demonstrated in Currys or Comet.

At our local Sony Centre, which sells neither Sky nor FreeSat and thus has no axe to grind, we were told that Sky gives less bandwidth to BBC HD than it does to its own HD programmes and that this produces a less good result. We were told (rightly or wrongly) that we'd get a better BBC HD picture on FreeSat than on Sky.

It was the BBC and ITV who set up FreeSat, so I'd imagine that they concentrate on producing the best signal possible.

Wherever the truth lies in that, you need have no worries about getting a marvellous broadcast BBC HD and ITV HD picture on a large Sony via FreeSat HD. Ours is magnificent.

Can only speak from our own experience but I hope this helps you.