I just called Sky

colmranger

Just to let people know i called sky a few minutes ago with the intention of completely canselling my account.

I also have the one year subscription to Premiership Plus. I told the guy my situation, i told him my favourite channel is not even on the Sky platform i.e. Channel 4, i told him it would only suit me if we had multi room but price for multi-room is rip off so he went away for a minute and wanted to see could he get me a reduced price on a Sky+ box.

He came back and said sorry not possible even though he pointed out i am with them since 2000. However he pursuaded me to cut down channels to Kids cartoons and music for €21 or thereabouts and i also get to keep Premiership Plus despite my favourite soccer team having a s**te season!

The guy in Sky office even said to me that he even cannot afford Sky HD as i was saying to him all sky prices are over the top.

watty

It's abouot 3,500 for a "real" HD TV (big enough to appreciate difference) anyway as apposed to these ordinary size "HD Ready" sets

Or 1,200 for WXGA projector "HD Ready" but about $8500 for true HD resolution projector.


If you can afford the "real" HD viewing, the SkyHD or Humax/pace HD for BBC HD (no sub) is not the cost limiting factor.

Sparky

I was looking at sky HD (Sky movies) on a pioneer 50" plasma and tbh I wasn't amazed by the picture.
Granted the SD version at that size was very pixilated but it just didn't cut it for me.

I began to goolge and it's coming up that the pioneer model I was watching doesn't seem to make it look the best.

It put me off Sky HD for another while anyway.

10000maniacs

Sparky-s wrote:

I was looking at sky HD (Sky movies) on a pioneer 50" plasma and tbh I wasn't amazed by the picture.
Granted the SD version at that size was very pixilated but it just didn't cut it for me.

I began to goolge and it's coming up that the pioneer model I was watching doesn't seem to make it look the best.

It put me off Sky HD for another while anyway.

Dixons in Jervis have got a Blu Ray HD Player hooked up to a 50 inch Plasma (I think its a Samsung), and again I wasn't overly impressed with the quality of the picture. They were showing S.W.A.T, and although it was more impressive than DVD, it wasn't exactly a sea-change in picture quality.
Maybe when Sony start using MPEG4 to encode their Blu Ray DVDs and use more than one layer, things will improve.

thos

The Sky Movies HD isnt the greatest content - you need Discovery to really appreciate it ...

watty

Most HD ready screens esp Plasma are not full HD resolution. The picture is resampled and often converted from Interlaced to Progressive. Both these processes add extra blur as well as the inherent loss of not having full resolution.

You can't see FULL HD quality without 1920 x 1080 interlaced NATIVE resolution. Very few HD ready sets have it.

Boggles

watty wrote:

Most HD ready screens esp Plasma are not full HD resolution. The picture is resampled and often converted from Interlaced to Progressive. Both these processes add extra blur as well as the inherent loss of not having full resolution.

You can't see FULL HD quality without 1920 x 1080 interlaced NATIVE resolution. Very few HD ready sets have it.

Are Sky broadcasting in this resolution?

cast_iron

colmranger wrote:

Just to let people know i called sky a few minutes ago with the intention of completely canselling my account.

I also have the one year subscription to Premiership Plus. I told the guy my situation, i told him my favourite channel is not even on the Sky platform i.e. Channel 4, i told him it would only suit me if we had multi room but price for multi-room is rip off so he went away for a minute and wanted to see could he get me a reduced price on a Sky+ box.

He came back and said sorry not possible even though he pointed out i am with them since 2000. However he pursuaded me to cut down channels to Kids cartoons and music for €21 or thereabouts and i also get to keep Premiership Plus despite my favourite soccer team having a s**te season!

The guy in Sky office even said to me that he even cannot afford Sky HD as i was saying to him all sky prices are over the top.

And....

pH

Has anyone seen any information on how Sky are getting 'HD movies'.

To me on my PJ the picture looks cleaner than normal Sky movies but they look more like very clean upscaled SD movies than HD.

Are Sky getting hold of genuine HD films or are they just taking advantage of the higher bitrates to broadcast a cleaner SD picture?

watty

Discovery and Nat Geo look better.

But unless you using a 45" or larger TV with NATIVE 1920 x 1080i, it will only look a bit better even if HD as the rescaling for 1366 x 768 or lower real native resolutions common on HDTV blurs the image.

Conversion of Interlace (1080i) blurs too.

Also some 720 line and 768 line native sets do 1080i to Progressive by throughing half the lines away giving 1920 x 540 which is rescaled to the native pixels!

SD is 720 x 576 on good channels and 544 x 576 on medium and 384 x 288 on rubbish channels.