High Def - can you tell the difference?

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guitarpete247

Just about surviving
Location
Leicestershire
I've read somewhere that if you have anything less than 42" HD is almost pointless. Dad bought a Freesat box with HD and connected it to his Toshiba Regza 32" with HDMI cable. There is some differenece but not enough to make me want to get HD as we have the same TV only a couple of months younger.
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
Crankarm said:
There you go marketing hype again. To see this supposed quality you are stating you need this extra bit, that extra bit and this special box. It's all hype as far as I can see. When I used to watch TV on my small 14" some ad used to come on stating how good this TV or image was. Yes it was, an extremely good image on my current TV, so why waste money changing?

To watch any tv you need tv, source (and if you want to distinguish something to make sense of it) and the actual content. People don't see the comparison because all three are so ubiquitous and cheap (if you're not fussy). Analog tv tuners were built into tvs so as long you have a working aerial plugged in properly bob's your uncle, digital ones are now built into many tvs, even where they aren't after a decade of STBs they are dirt cheap and have been for well quite a while. It's not really any different from having a widescreen tv plugged in to an aerial, a freeview channel that is in widescreen but the content is only 4:3 so it appears 4:3. Or say a classic clip in black and white on a colour tv.

TV technology has changed a number of times - 405 lines changed to 625 lines (and colour), Digital came in in the late 90s, widescreen came in the early to mid noughties on many channels (and later tvs) and high definition is another and 3D where ever that is going, yet another still. If people don't want high definition they'll be fine, freeview HD boxes are backwards compatible so there's no need to kick everyone who'll be on digital after 2012 off onto something else till the early to mid 2020s, unless someone changes their mind which one can never rule out :biggrin:. Hopefully by then instead of being £150-200 the chips will like in the freeview boxes make those boxes £30.

And I have no complaints with my stuff, my blu-ray player upscaled all those DVDs reasonably well as well as playing blu-rays. The only complaint I think really is that the prices of the hardware haven't dropped anywhere near as fast as people would have liked. Then again the content isn't really there - there are only three terrestrial HD channels as of this moment.
 

darkstar

New Member
Crankarm said:
I think it was, so that's your argument torpedoed. Like others have said I have looked at some in Comet and local TV shops whilst looking for other stuff and have been totally unimpressed with the supposed quality.
Well then its either an old screen or he's not set it up properly. A new, top quality Full HD Samsung screen with good contrast and frame speed produces fantastic images. I'm watching one as we speak, it sounds like your mate has a monster of a screen (i hate massive screens, over 50 inch) which is 'HD Ready' and not 1080p.
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
Put one of the football matches on, and she'll see the difference clearly if you flick between the two.

Ours is a 32" LG tv.

Specifically ITV1 to ITV HD, because ITV1 is much worse than BBC1 - although one can still see a big difference even there.

People will be an awful lot happier with HD when the terrestrial channels are available to them in HD for free, at the moment with there's just BBC HD, ITV HD and Channel 4 HD which people don't really understand and the BBC in their arrogance think there's little demand and their hodge podge channel is the best thing since sliced bread. That or when the sky £10 charge goes but they've sewn up so much content that it'll impact on freesat and freeview.
 

Crankarm

Guru
Location
Nr Cambridge
You need to go somewhere like John Lewis or Richer Sounds, where they understand that they need to be showing the best picture possible to customers.

Done that. The lardy perspiring JL chappy told me a load of porkies. If I didn't by an HD LCD TV, but kept my excellent quality 14" Phillips stereo CRT TV and merely connected a set top box to it to get freeview, I would be watching programmes through a letter box. This hasn't been the case at all. He also said the reception would be poor which it wasn't. I wouldn't even touch JL with a barge pole let alone buy anything from them. They think they are so flippin' superior. Well they are not. Lots of other places give far better service IMHO. Anyway I don't watch TV anymore, not for 9 months now, except when I visit friends whose huge LCD HD TVs take up nearly half their lounges. All that energy to run them. Who had this idea for huge f'kin TV screens anyway?
 

CharlesF

Guru
Location
Glasgow
Like setting up a HiFi, you need quality cables, otherwise you are wasting your time. The HDMI cable Virgin hands out is a cheap as possible, you need to buy something like a QED cable for around £30 to get all the benefits of HD. Buy a copy of What HiFi Sound and Vision for recommendations.
 

mark barker

New Member
Location
Swindon, Wilts
Crankarm said:
Who had this idea for huge f'kin TV screens anyway?
I've wondered the same... When I was a kid back in the '80s my folks had a 21" TV, now they've got a 50" stuck on the wall. Has their eyesight really got that bad?:sad:

I'm not a fan of TV, in fact if it wasn't for the F1 and BTCC I wouldn't have one at all, and my TV is a good old CRT 25" that was free from freecycle!
 

ianrauk

Tattooed Beat Messiah
Location
Rides Ti2
Sorry that is complete rubbish. HDMI signal is digital, therefore is 1's and 0's. So what goes in one end comes out the same the other. It will be the same signal through a 99p cable as through a £30 cable. If you spend that amount of money on a cable, it's not for the signal/Picture, it's for better components.

There are a million internet discussion and tests you can find about HDMI cables. And if I remember correctly The Gadget Show did a test between cheap and expensive cables and found no difference what so ever.

CharlesF said:
Like setting up a HiFi, you need quality cables, otherwise you are wasting your time. The HDMI cable Virgin hands out is a cheap as possible, you need to buy something like a QED cable for around £30 to get all the benefits of HD. Buy a copy of What HiFi Sound and Vision for recommendations.
 
I can tell the difference, but surely most of this comes down to the enviroment its being watched in and the quality of the display. A big screen in a small room vs a small screen at the other end of a big room. Surely the push for HD has come from the bigger displays over the last few years having a worse image quality purely down to them stretching the same pixels over a bigger area. Try setting your monitor to 800x600 and seeing how far away its still readable at compared to the what ever it is on even a 19" screen.
Quality. Currys/comet/whoever had a display with 3 TVs, all the same size, a plasma, LCD and an LED. I much preferred the plasma, my wife the LED. But it is subjective.
 

Slowgrind

New Member
You can't beat my little old faithful 5" black and white Rigonda!
It's so clear that you can almost recognise a persons face especially if the sound's turned up!
Oh I'll never forget Reginald Bosanquet on News At Ten!
Why can't they put him on now?
 

c2c

redredrobin
Location
east bristol
cranky you old luddite, the difference between the two formats is quite adequately displayed watching pro cycling. when cycling over the alps the vistas are stunning in high def, switch to standard and the difference is stark.
 

Maz

Guru
Put one of the football matches on, and she'll see the difference clearly if you flick between the two.

Ours is a 32" LG tv.
I don't think I could bear to watch Rob Green's fck up in HD.
 
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