SKY HD install next week but no HD telly yet

Washout

Hi guys,

got letter from sky for install of Sky HD next week. I was expecting to buy a HD tv this week but I havent recieved gift vouchers (as a bonus) from work yet...so i am awaiting those before going out and buy.

my question i can the installer complete the installation of HD without a HD tv?

Im also getting a second box which will work on my current TV anyways so that can be installed but just wondering if he needws to do something funky with the HD box?

Tony

He can install no problem

watty

Make sure you get a TV with HDMI, bigger than 37" and native 1080 lines or 1200 lines resolution, or else you might as well just use an ordinary TV with it. Apart from the HD ouput on HDMI, the SCART o/p and menus etc, it behaves very like a Sky+. Many Satellite HD channels have a high proportion of non-HD content. The BBC HD trial channel is entirely real HD.

Obviously only the content transmitted in HD is actually HD (The majority of Americans and UK digital viewers confuse "Digital" and "HD" thinking that if they have digital and an "HD Ready" TV, that they have HD. Also many "HD Ready" TVs are not HD! You need a minimum of 1920 x 1080i NATIVE resolution (not resampled/rescaled) to actually see HD. Many TVs are only 1366x 768, which is a C widescreen resolution that will degrade HD pictures and even show standard TV slightly blurred compared with a good CRT.

There is NO difference in resolution between 1080i and 1080p. The i & p is how fast movement is managed. No 1080p is transmitted, nor ever likely, the 1080p is needed for USA (not Europe) DVDs from Film and for computer or game consoles.

No 720p is transmitted in Europe/UK/Ireland, it is not a big enough improvement on PAL 576 line (it is a good improvement on US 480 line, hence used there). All Sky HD is 1080i and the Skydigibox should be set to 1080i. The 720p setting is for TVs that are not fully HD compatible.

Washout

The TV I had my eye on was this one

http://www.didstore.com/store_detail.asp?modelcode=LC42XD1E&subid=195

its a Sharp 42".

since you know maore about this than me is this a good option to go for or if not could you suggest a decent 42" aroundt the 2K mark?

thanks Watty

watty

Sounds good entry level HD.

See if you can see it displaying BBC HD on movement. If the screen is natively progressive (1080p) it has to convert the interlaced signal (1080i). This can ironicly blur movement. It's easier to convert Progressive to interlace than vice versa.

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/1080p-LCD-Shootout/

Google LC42XD1E deinterlace

I can't recommend any specific model. However the one you are looking at is a reasonable spec.

The Sharp sounds a little poor on video processing, background noise.

uncle_sam_ie

Watty,
I just got SkyHD installed on monday and am using it on a plasma 42" Pioneer PDP-4270XD. It's not full HD, but it looks dam good to me. I can defiantly see the difference between SD and HD. I've got a friend with an 40" Phillips LCD(full 1080 HD) hooked up to SkyHD and I think my set looks way better then his.

uncle_sam_ie

My son's friend just through the Wii remote into my Pioneer and cracked the screen.:eek: :eek: It looks like I'll be getting a full HD set after all. http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=337232

watty

uncle_sam_ie wrote:

Watty,
I just got SkyHD installed on monday and am using it on a plasma 42" Pioneer PDP-4270XD. It's not full HD, but it looks dam good to me. I can defiantly see the difference between SD and HD. I've got a friend with an 40" Phillips LCD(full 1080 HD) hooked up to SkyHD and I think my set looks way better then his.

Could be differences in Contrast & brightness, room lighting, etc. The colours on plasma are more accurate.

LCD has fairly poor colour compared with CRT. Somebody is experimenting with red, green and blue led strip backlights on LCD instead of white backlight with coloured filter on front. It gives poorer viewing angle (parallax), but within the view it is almost CRT colour quality and 4 to 5 times the brightness for same power (or same brightness but 1/4 power).

The holy grail at the minute is OLED screen. Unfortunately OLEDs are not LEDs in the traditional sense, but similar to EL panels (ironically the oldest flat display technology dating from late 1950s!). EL used to need about 300V, OLED is low volatage, but blue particularly has shorter life. EL has never had great life compared with traditional LEDs or CRT.

An OLED screen can have perfect contrast ratio (black is simply the reflected ambient, no backlight leakage, real LCD contrast is limited to about 800:1), 170 degree viewing angle with no colour shift and if coloured R G B OLED, perfect colour. However many colour OLED use white (actually UV with phosphor) OLEDs with coloured stripes so are less efficent and similar colour to LCD.

Mossy Monk

720p is a huge improvement for me too I must admit.

ixtlan

To put my usual damper on Watty's insistence on 1080 (full HD) TVs...

He speaks of theory, comparing a perfect SD signal to a HD one.

In reality, SD bitrate is far too low and when blown up to 37" and up it looks poor. If SD was very high bitrate, then yes, it would almost be as good as HD on 37" TVs. However it isn't so that's why people see a massive difference switching to HD on a HD TV. They would even see an improvement on an old CRT connected to a SkyHD box with SCART!

It's not the extra pixel information, it's more the bitrate. This is also why HD-ready 768-line TVs (plasma or LCD) can look as good at a distance as a full-hd TV. At reasonable distances most people simply cannot see the difference.

So, while I agree with Watty that FullHD is "better", you may not notice...

Ix

watty

BBC & RTE are high bit rate.
Since almost no regular channels are in HD I can't figure what your claiming. A 768 line 37" TV blurs regular SD TV.

What you claim won't stand up on a 1:1 comparison. 768 Line TVs are a rip off. A good SD or full HD set will beat them every time.
NOTHING is transmitted in 720p here. Only for HD content, will 720 or 768 will give improvement on a decently set up SD TV. There is very little HD content, and at 28" will give no improvement at all compared with SD at normal viewing distance.

uncle_sam_ie

Well, from what I've been reading unless you have a 70" screen you wont tell the difference between a full HD and a HD ready 768 line one. This is that right?

Calibos

uncle_sam_ie wrote:

Well, from what I've been reading unless you have a 70" screen you wont tell the difference between a full HD and a HD ready 768 line one. This is that right?

I kind of agree with Watty re. 720p -v- 1080p but for different reasons.

Several blind group tests from members of AVforums and AVSforum including a big 40 person group test in Greece showed that until screen sizes got to 130inches diagonal!! nobody could reliably tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. They had 2 comparible DLP projectors from the same manufacturer with a nearly identical feature set except one was a 720p PJ and one was a 1080p. The PJ's were hidden, lenses masked and each projected half an image onto a single screen. They had several screen sizes to hand and everyone voted on whether they saw a difference and which PJ they thought was which. They would then roll out a bigger screen and vote again etc. At 110-120inches only a small percentage of the group test could reliably tell which was 720p or 1080p. It was only when the screen size got to 130inches that statistically the majority of the group could tell.

So don't expect to see any resolution difference between 720p and 1080p on a 42in plasma unless you are sitting 2 foot from the screen.

But..............

A bugbear of a lot of people is jerky movement and pans caused by frame rate conversion from cinema/celluloid 24 frames per second to America's SD NTSC system of 60HZ/FPS and/or the conversion to PAL's 50HZ. Anyway BLURAY and HD-DVD offer a solution to the Jerky judder etc in the form of 1080P/24hz ouput.

For that Reason any PLasma I buy that I will be using a BLU-RAY/HD-DVD player with will be a 1080p one (Assuming it supports 1080p/24 of course)

Same with my PJ. I have a 720p Panasonic AE900 at the moment. I might be moving to a bigger house where I'll be able to fit a 120inch+ screen. I won't be replacing my Panny with a 1080p because I think I will really need the extra resolution. I'll be replacing it with a 1080p to eliminate any traces of jerky movement/pans and judder when watching Bluray and HD-DVD's.

ixtlan

watty wrote:

BBC & RTE are high bit rate.
Since almost no regular channels are in HD I can't figure what your claiming. A 768 line 37" TV blurs regular SD TV.

What you claim won't stand up on a 1:1 comparison. 768 Line TVs are a rip off. A good SD or full HD set will beat them every time.
NOTHING is transmitted in 720p here. Only for HD content, will 720 or 768 will give improvement on a decently set up SD TV. There is very little HD content, and at 28" will give no improvement at all compared with SD at normal viewing distance.

Hi Watty.

Yes a 768 TV will blur SD. As will a 1080 TV.

Yes a 768 TV will blur HD but a 1080 will not. OK, but at normal viewing distances the level of blurring will be imperceptible to most people.

If we are talking about SD TVs, there aren't any anymore other than CRTs so SD will always be a compromise. Also while in theory 1080 TVs should be as good as 768 for SD in practice the scaling chips are not good enough and 768 TVs can be better.

I think your argument above is a little unclear.

I accept that 1080 TVs are "better" for HD. When I buy I will likely buy one. What I object to is your presentation of 768 TVs as so obviously inferior to 1080s. As Calibos explained so well, normal unfussy people won't notice a difference. I will want better. I will want to know that from 2ft away my picture is better. However as a TV obsessive people ask me for advice and I don't want to force them to waste money.

Say you're looking on Komplett for a 40" TV. About 1200 gets you the Samsung R series (768). About 1600 get's you the Samsung M series (1080). For me that's a no-brainer. I'll get the M, but Joe Bloggs wants to know whether the 30% price premium is something he'll notice, and my understanding is that he will not. Going into more detail, if he asks which TV overall to get, I can't even say the M... since people have software issues with it. In terms of customer satisfaction, Joe might be better off with the Sony D3000 (768) at 1900. Very expensive but buyers are estatic, and seem to believe they get a better image than with 1080 TVs. Now me again... I'm looking for the perfect TV, so I may wait for the forthcoming Sony W3000 (1080) TVs.

I am somewhat puzzled why you believe the 1080 TVs are so absolutely necesssary. You have in the past commented that TVs at 37" and 40" are not even good enough to show HD. I understand what you mean by this. There's more information in HD than the human eye can see at that screen size and normal viewing distances. That is the reason why 768 TVs are good enough. The 1080 image scaled to 768 still has more than enough information to keep the eye happy.

In maybe a year, all the TVs will be 1080 and this argument will be irrelevant, but if Joe Bloggs is buying a TV tomorrow, he probably can safely save 30% and get a 768. I won't. I want 1080, just so that I can sleep well knowing I have the best from any distance. However some people don't want/need to pay that premium.

OLEDs in theory will be excellent, but they are still years away from being commercially viable for consumer TVs. A few years ago they looked very promising, but their introduction was delayed, and then LCDs plummetted in price/performance. Now they will be unable to come in at the high end of the market and they will be delayed even more. SED is the same.

Ix.

ixtlan

Calibos wrote:

I kind of agree with Watty re. 720p -v- 1080p but for different reasons.

A bugbear of a lot of people is jerky movement and pans caused by frame rate conversion from cinema/celluloid 24 frames per second to America's SD NTSC system of 60HZ/FPS and/or the conversion to PAL's 50HZ. Anyway BLURAY and HD-DVD offer a solution to the Jerky judder etc in the form of 1080P/24hz ouput.

For that Reason any PLasma I buy that I will be using a BLU-RAY/HD-DVD player with will be a 1080p one (Assuming it supports 1080p/24 of course)

Same with my PJ. I have a 720p Panasonic AE900 at the moment. I might be moving to a bigger house where I'll be able to fit a 120inch+ screen. I won't be replacing my Panny with a 1080p because I think I will really need the extra resolution. I'll be replacing it with a 1080p to eliminate any traces of jerky movement/pans and judder when watching Bluray and HD-DVD's.

I don't think the resolution has any effect whatsoever on the "judder" issue. Scaling 1080 images down to 768 is very easy and not processor intensive.

The judder issue is one of taking a 24fps stream and converting it to 30fps so that it can be shown on current LCD/plasma TVs. This is down with 3:2 pulldown where different frames are repeated different times. This can result in so-called judder on panning shots.

The solution to this is to have the TVs/projectors accept 24fps and display it directly with no processing. At the moment there's a small but growing number of Tvs that will do this.

Whether the TV is 1080 or 768 makes no difference to the judder. Yes, the 768 will be scaling, but such scaling will not be noticable more than a few feet away.

The Sony D3000 is a 768 TV that accepts 24fps and people appear very happy with the absense of judder. The Samsung M series 1080 TVs can accept 24fps but only the most recently manufactured ones work properly with the PS3.

Ix.

Calibos

Excellent posts ixtlan!

.........but your second post there is moot, as thats what I was saying anyway, though you did explain it better.

ie I will be replacing our current CRT's with 1080p Plasmas and my 720p PJ with a 1080p PJ not that I think I will even notice the resolution difference but for the unrelated to Res. reason of eliminating 3:2 pulldown etc judder. It just so happens that the displays designed to make the most of this 1080p/24 output will probably be 1080p. My AE900 720p PJ supports 1080p/24 downscaled to its native 720p but I'll be happy to upgrade in about a year to a native1080/24 PJ with the latest video decoding chipset. Like you, not for reasons of Resolution but just to know I am future proofed a bit and am watching the smoothest image I can. Like you I am prepared to pay a premium for this that the average punter probably is not.

ixtlan

Hi Calibos,

Many thanks! Just gone past 200 posts too!

Yes, I understand what you are getting at. I was trying to make clear that while you may buy new hardware for the ability to accept 1080/24p that hardware does not need to show a 1080 image. There will be 768 TVs that do 24fps too. However certainly most such devices in the future will be 1080. I suspect the Sony D3000s may be the last Sony generation with 768.

On the matter of judder, I am very knowledgeable about it in theory but can't say I've ever really noticed it, even with R1 NTSC DVDs. Maybe with smaller 32" CRTs it's not as noticeable, or maybe it just doesn't affect me much?

I know many people watching Bluray/HD-DVD disks find it very annoying. Maybe it's the larger screen making it more of a problem?

Ix.

Calibos

Well I'll admit I am probably the same. I can always notice it when I look for it but I very rarely notice it when I am not looking for it. I can tune it out as it were. Its not a huge deal for me but I am prepared to pay a bit of a premium to totally eliminate it.

Though now that I think of it I do recall being pulled out of the film momentarily(Oceans 13) in the cinema last week when I noticed a jerky camera pan. Quickly 'Tuned it out' and got back into the movie though.

So it seems that even with the Holy Grail of a video output of 1080p/24 which gives the closest approximation so far to cinema celluloid, we have managed to eliminate most if not all of the foibles of conversion from celluloid to the home format but are left with the one foible we can do nothing about....ie. the fact that celluloids image capture of 24 frames per second is not quite enough for the eyes and brain to interpret silky smooth motion.

Will we be stuck with this legacy of 24fps even when all films are filmed with digital cameras capable of much higher capture rates??

zilog_jones

Are films on Bluray and HD DVDs released over here all 24p as well? I just assumed they'd just speed them up to 25fps as per usual with PAL telecine for legacy reasons... though I dunno who'll get a HD player and not have an HDTV for it...

watty

No they are 25fps. We do not have the 3:2 pull down artifact problem which makes Progressive or 24fps important in America & Japan.

If you try and play a non-NTSC region DVD/HD/Blu disk at 24fps, the sound will be too low in pitch as the sound pitch is corrected for the PAL telecine transfer on disk mastering.

The 3:2 pull down artifact is not really a judder, there is no judder in any telecine, but a comb effect on horizontal motion, most visible on moving vertical edges. It's very noticeable also on 25fps / PAL TV badly converted to progressive at a different frame rate (i.e. 60 to 82 fps PC screen, setting refresh to exactly 75Hz or 100Hz is best).

You can perfectly convert progressive 24fps to 24i or 25i, but you can't convert 25i perfectly to 50p. USA progressive DVD players make a hash if the content is 30i video. They only work well for film as US film DVD are stored as 24p and the 30i telecine (3:2 pulldown ) is done by the player anyway. Non NorthAmerican/Japan DVD from film the telecine is already done with pitch conversion on the audio for the 25i done before mastering.


All you need ever for 25fps is 1080i, Europe only needs 1080p for game consoles. It is EXACTLY the same resolution, just 50% flicker reduction on single horizonal lines ONLY. Since LCD are slow compared with CRT, you may not even notice any single line flicker (badly done captions etc). Photographic content does not generally have the sort of content that shows this, only lower quality unaliased captions and computer games.

720p eliminates NTSC/30fps pull down. There is no Pulldown judder on PAL/25fps.

Transmissions will always be 1080i in Europe.

Unless you buy R1 DVD there is no value in a 24p player/screen (US DVD only 480 line compared with 576 line for Europe). On HD/Blu and DVD region coding will soon only be for 30fps / 25fps distinction as the reason will be gone soon. (Film abolished in Cinema, allowing simultaneous release with later simultaneous DVD release)

watty

Sadly some (many?) 768 line progressive TVs just take half the 540 line (interlaced to 1080i) and upscale to 768. This gives perfect interlace to 768p conversion at expense of making vertical resolution slightly worse than PAL.

Similarly most (all?) LCDs smaller than 10" only have approx 240 to 250 lines and solve the interlace issue the same way for regular 576 line PAL.


There is a lot of myth and nonsense about this whole areas as there is virtually no place you can see these things setup for comparison and so few real HD TVs in shops are actually fed directly with HD content and all have colour & contrast too high.

ixtlan

Sorry Watty, but I think you are wrong on the 24fps issue.

I'm about 95% sure about this...

The decision was taken by the powers that be that they were abandoning the conversation to 25fps on HD-DVD/Bluray. As far as I know all disks will be encoded as 24fps on the disk. The disks are still region locked but should be the same otherwise. I guess it's cheaper this way. Therefore a 24fps TV or projector really will be useful, even in Europe.

A little googling later let me correct this... it is possible for 25fps disks to be made available, and maybe it will happen, but at the moment almost all disks are 24fps.

As for the judder, I'm not so sure, but I think you may be wrong here also, at least with regard to HD. If the content is encoded at 24fps progressive then there will be no interlacing issues at all, but people still report judder when the TV is fed with a 60fps signal. As I said though... open to correction on this...

Ix.

zilog_jones

Yeah, I thought with all HD stuff the video can be progressive 24fps, and as part of the "HD Ready" standard the TVs have to support 24p video directly. Even with DVDs this can be true, it's just the player applies the 3:2 for SD output. However, this doesn't always happen with DVDs and many "NTSC" DVD film telecine conversions are encoded as 60i with hard 3:2 pulldown - it's always the case when there's film mixed with 60i or 30p content (e.g. a lot of TV shows, anime, etc.) as AFAIK an MPEG2 video stream can't be a combination of framerates.

If you try and play a non-NTSC region DVD/HD/Blu disk at 24fps, the sound will be too low in pitch as the sound pitch is corrected for the PAL telecine transfer on disk mastering.

From my experience, pitch correction is rarely (or never?) used as it causes too much distortion. Whenever I hear a song I know very well in a film (or US TV show) gone through PAL telecine, I have always noticed the higher pitch. I have noticed this with even the most recent films I've seen on TV or DVD. Maybe I'm wrong, I dunno. Pitch correction seems to be a frowned-upon thing by the audiophiles though.

ixtlan

zilog_jones wrote:

Yeah, I thought with all HD stuff the video can be progressive 24fps, and as part of the "HD Ready" standard the TVs have to support 24p video directly.

The "HD Ready" logo does not specify that the TV has to take 24fps. In fact very very few TVs currently do this.

It's another feature like "Full HD" which manufacturers will try to convince buyers is a necessary feature. It is "better" (and I want it) but Joe Bloggs may not really notice.

Ix.