[Matt F]

Seems it could never happen!

HDforAll - the campaign for high definition TV on Freeview



Matt.

[Liam O'Neill]

Whatever Ofcom do, you can't have HD on Freeview until 2012. The terrestrial system, from where the bandwidth for HD Freeview is to come from, won't be switched off in the south until 2012.
I can't believe that Ofcom would dare do anything that would make it impossible to broadcast the Olympics in HD on Freeview in 2012. Stupider things have happened, but surely the plans have that goal firmly established?

[abirkill]

Also bear in mind that you can receive all the free-to-air HD channels available (which is just BBC HD at the moment) via satellite without requiring a subscription - you just need a dish and an HD satellite receiver.

The Humax HDCI2000 can be bought for around £225, or the Sky HD box for around £300 (which will give you the option to upgrade to Sky at a later date without having to buy a new HD receiver). Both will pick up BBC HD (and any other free-to-air HD channels as they are launched) if they're connected to a dish pointing in the right general direction, and are likely to give you a better image than Freeview as there is less bandwidth contention and hence (theoretically) a lower compression rate via satellite.

[Matt F]

Yeah - the 2012 thing surprised me - I thought they were supposed to be switching off analogue in 2008?

Matt.

[Dave]

Yep & provide Digital across the nation by 2008....but not HD Digital

[Angela]

This is a subject that totally confuses me! We're wanting to buy a new TV soon and I don't know whether to go with a normal tv (price is much more attractive!) with a digibox, a Digital tv or an HD ready TV

[orangepeel]

nobody can tell you what to do but for me I'm not going near it till it's well and truly mainstream.

My bud is HD'd up to his eyes, we won't talk about the price he paid for being an early adopter, and while it is pretty I don't think it's worth the money he's spent. Not when you consider that they way they are messing around with formats may well mean his kit becomes obsolete.

There are far too many variables atm. Is your TV 1080 or 720 (check the price difference!) will movies be blueray or HDDVD, will DTT set top boxes change the MPEG format (sky are proposing their DTT boxes will have an incompatible MPEG format).

Ask yourself if your enjoyment of your fave soap/reality tv show/news be that much improved by HD?

[Liam O'Neill]

Digital Television - What is Digital Switchover?

It starts in some regiosn next year, but won't end until 2012. I'm not sure how feasible it would be to have the early regions switch to a broader spectrum while other regions still have the current narrower spectrum. With London not switching until 2012, I imagine there aren't too many people in TV-land who are really that fussed about doing that anyway.

2 t0 1 that after everyone has switched and Freeview is given a wider spectrum to allow it have more channels and do full HD broadcasts, you will need a new Freeview receiver, and the one currently built into the TV you bought 6 months before won't actually work anymore.

Originally Posted by orangepeel

Ask yourself if your enjoyment of your fave soap/reality tv show/news be that much improved by HD?

Those things won't, but things like nature documentaries or televised plays/concerts will be better. The clincher though for broadcast TV, is sport. When various sports started being broadcast in HD for the first time in America, the common consenus amongst almost every reporter I read was that they simply could not believe how much better the games looked in HD. I haven't seen it myself, I only have their word for it.
More important than the TV though will be films. We'll have to see which format wins out in the end, but once one of them does, higher definition DVD's will be a driver for a lot of people to get a HD TV that makes the most of that DVD. Look at the sales push from "surround sound". Higher definition DVD pictures will be bigger than that.

[Dave]

Re the different disc formats for HS, I notice LG have a player than can cope with both & the Superman movie has HD-DVD format on 1 side of the disc & Blue Ray on the other

[orangepeel]

Originally Posted by Dave

Re the different disc formats for HS, I notice LG have a player than can cope with both & the Superman movie has HD-DVD format on 1 side of the disc & Blue Ray on the other

great! so we pay a more because the greedy *******s at sony/toshiba can't knock heads together and come up with a single format. or do you seriously believe dual format disks and player are cheaper to produce than a single format?

I don't mind that these companies care more about their own bottom line than your wallet - it's to be expected. What annoys the crap outa me is the sheep/fanbois who say buy one or the other. It simply confuses people who don't know much about the whole HD thing and further fractures and already bad situation.

Don't buy either until you can go to blockbuster and one section for one format is markedly bigger than the other, including SD (normal) DVD.

[Dave]

Wise enough to have be around when the Betamax / VHS war broke out....so I'll sit back & wait for one to lose, berfore I go anywhere near this stuff

[abirkill]

Originally Posted by orangepeel

My bud is HD'd up to his eyes, we won't talk about the price he paid for being an early adopter, and while it is pretty I don't think it's worth the money he's spent. Not when you consider that they way they are messing around with formats may well mean his kit becomes obsolete.

The HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle may render his player obsolete, but not anything else. 720p and 1080i are already well-established (don't forget that HD has been commercially available in the US for over five years now), and even if 1080p gains popularity, the relative simplicity of converting between formats means that any consumer 1080p device will be able to output in 1080p, 1080i, 720p, PAL and NTSC!

While it might not be cost-effective to buy an HD-ready TV, and while you might prefer to wait until the prices drop, it's certainly not a risky purchase.

Originally Posted by orangepeel

Ask yourself if your enjoyment of your fave soap/reality tv show/news be that much improved by HD?

Almost certainly not, and if that is all you watch on TV then HD is almost certainly not for you. But because your viewing habits don't benefit from an HD image doesn't mean that the technology is pointless. Sports, movies, and so on all benefit from a higher-resolution image, especially with television sizes increasing as they are. 10 years ago the average screen size was in the region of 21 inches. These days, people are regularly buying 42 or 50 inch televisions! And they're not sitting any further back from them.

As the cost and depth of screens continues to decrease, more and more people are going to be replicating cinema-type experiences in their homes - it doesn't take a ridiculously large screen to result in a viewing angle that is similar to that of an average-sized commerical cinema (bearing in mind how much closer you sit to the screen at home). Broadcast PAL-resolution images on that and it's barely watchable.

Also, while there are programmes that do benefit directly from HD resolution (for example, the BBC's excellent Planet Earth series), there are other shows that, while not needing to be broadcast in HD, are damn impressive when they are - for example, the new series of 24 doesn't need HD - people watch it for the story rather than the cinematography. But watching it in HD really is like looking through a window, and it's very engrossing.

Originally Posted by orangepeel

do you seriously believe dual format disks and player are cheaper to produce than a single format?

I think you're mistaking the theoretical price with the on-the-street price here. Is a Blu-ray disc reader mechanism cheaper to make one of than a combined disc reader mechanism? Absolutely! But if the manufacturer is selling 1,000 Blu-ray disc reader mechanisms a year, and 1,000,000 combined reader mechanisms a year, you can probably guess which is actually cheaper. It's like saying it's more expensive to build a digital camera with a live LCD preview - yes, the component cost of that particularly bit is more expensive, but I think we can all agree that we could buy 5 digicams with live LCD previews for the cost of the cheapest DSLR.