Tech
Does the new High Definition TV service live up to its hype? It is a good question and one that is harder to answer than you might have thought. As you already know if you haven’t put down your £299 for a Sky HD box when the offer was launched back in April you won’t see your box for some time. My High Definition box arrived a couple of weeks ago.
Firstly the installation went fine – I did run foul of the problem with the wrong card being put in the wrong box – after a few calls to Sky they told me that the “Primary” card was the one in my standard digibox and once that was in the HD box all was fine – even better I was happy that I could still see my Sky+ recordings (good as recordings on Sky+ boxes are keyed to the card for playback - change the card and you can't get to your recordings).
Connecting up to my screen was an interesting exercise mainly because I have a 6 year old Pioneer MX-502 Plasma that doesn’t (as is the case with many early plasma screens) do 50Hz HD. I have always been very happy with the SD picture on this screen and so I decided to stick with it and get a scalar to do rate conversion from 50 to 60Hz – I chose Calibre’s, UK designed, Vantage HD after some research. It arrived the same day as Sky HD so I was keeping my fingers crossed that it would work.
The Vantage arrived first and once it had been plugged into my screen and we had checked the menus worked at the correct output resolution we needed a source and I tried my Sony HDV 1080i camcorder. Even with my dodgy camera work the clarity and depth of detail in the background of the image was amazing – enough for my wife to say wow.
When the installer from Sky arrived we initially plugged in the HDMI connection – which I didn’t expect to work – as Calibre correctly follow the HDCP rules and so without a terminating HDCP screen it shouldn’t handshake correctly. It didn't work. Next we plugged in the analogue component HD connection and all was fine. We then calibrated the picture to be centred – there was a definite left shift between the BBC HD broadcasts and the Sky ones.
Next we then looked at the different input and output options and after very little time we worked out that the best solution was to have the Sky HD box output the original broadcast format (1080i) and for the scalar to convert to the screens 720p resolution – we also tried sending 1080i out but it was quite obvious that the modern Vantage HD did a better job of 1080i to 720p than the 6 year old screen (not that surprising considering the amount of processor power in the vantage HD). Finally we looked at the colour balance / brightness and contrast – hard to do without a set of HD colour charts etc but one has to make do. The initial settings were very bright and slightly red but with a bit of fiddling we got to something that looked OK. But it has needed more tweaking over the following days to get something that I am happy with.
The initial reaction from the Sky installers when we started watching the Cricket was how good the picture was and I was also much more impressed with the cricket than I had been a couple of weeks before when I went to preview the HD service at Sky’s headquarters. But for me that is not the important thing - it is the other programming and how it looks.
I remember when I first hooked up a HD source to my screen many years ago (a US HD-VHS player and some demo tapes) the pictures caused everyone to go wow – but they were demos and when the movies came out the wow wasn’t quite as loud. The thing about HD is that it does, so they say, have 4 times the amount of information as a SD picture and in a brightly lit demo of buildings or scenery it is jaw-droppingly beautiful but when you are watching an episode of 24 or a sci fi movie that takes place in the dark the depth of detail available is harder to see.
There is definitely a difference but some of the content, if you compare the same broadcast side by side, is less noticeable than you might have thought. Not that I would want to go back to the SD versions – this is made worse if you have a good screen that deals well with SD images as the ultimate resolution of most screens will be the limiting factor, i.e. it is higher for SD and lower for HD. Both are being manipulated by the electronics to work with a screen that at the moment in the market are mainly 720p (1270x720) there are 1080 screens coming but they are less common and there are screens with lower resolutions.
The first thing you notice comparing a scene recorded in each mode (on different boxes) is that unless you have the same colour / brightness / contrast rendition the things that you will find annoying in the picture will be the colour or brightness and not the resolution. But as you can see below in the worst case of a dark scene in 24 below an SD image
As you can see the picture is slightly soft all over but you only realise why when you see the HD version:
When you realise that the plane is in focus and on the HD image the plane is crisp and in focus while “Audrey” is slightly out of focus.
Here are another couple of images:
And the other version:
These were both taken with the same camera and screen one from a Sky+ box and the other from a SkyHD box the HD one has more detail and is sharper.
Obviously still images don’t really tell the tale but it does show some of the core differences. Some scenes compare even less favourably and some are so blindingly different that you wouldn’t ever go back to the old version. But what is most noticeable is that the “difference” is, not surprisingly, in the detail. When people say HD is so much better (or not) you have to look at it and think “what is better?” What is different is the level of detail that you can see – which is why people talk about standing closer to HD screens; the reality is that you have an image with more information in it and so to get the best out of it and to resolve the detail you need to be closer to the image.
The HD box itself isn’t perfect - as the comments on the forum make out - but so far mine hasn’t been too badly behaved. Is the content worth the extra £10 a month (plus the £299 for the box)? Well, that is always a hard one to answer and everyone’s view of value is different. The core value is in the movies and sport but at the moment there aren’t enough entertainment channels / content in HD. What is a pity is that with the small number of movie channels available that Sky haven’t used the “extra” disk space to launch a movies on demand service with a mix of movies from HD9/10 and SBO HD1/2 that are downloaded when the box isn’t doing anything else. It would add a great deal of value to the HD proposition for movie lovers as at the moment you have to record the movies you want and hope that it doesn’t clash with other recordings you want to make. Either that or they need to implement the “show me the next showing of…” option so you can see a movie is playing and find out when it is next playing at the touch of a single button – so you can find another time to record it.
But overall Sky’s HD service does deliver and work as it is supposed to and the improved quality is going to be great over the summer. And to answer my own question, if you are a movie fan (where this is the only sensible HD source at present) or a sports fan the £10 a month is very reasonable.
Of course if you don’t have Sky HD yet or your box isn’t going to be with you until after the World Cup, is there anything you can do?
The answer is that as the BBC's transmissions are FTA, if you are really keen you can get a FTA HD receiver. I had a play with the Humax HDCI2000 (there is also the PACE DS810XE). The Humax arrived and I unpacked it without any fuss until I received an email reminding me that to get the BBC broadcast I needed to download new software via a null modem cable (something that your independent satellite installer should do for you). Fortunately I have a null modem cable but it wouldn’t have been something I had except for the fact that I used it for controlling a TiVo many years ago and more recently for checking the serial consoles on our servers here at Digital Spy. Once I had connected up the cable downloading the new software was painless enough. And I then took the box upstairs to connect it to the satellite dish and screen. Firstly the box I had came with a European power plug (again the ones in the UK distribution channel will have UK 3 pin plugs) but that was easy to deal with and I plugged in the satellite lead from my old Sky box and the HDMI cable into the back of my scalar and switched on. Hey presto it worked (no HDCP handshake here causing problems).
The startup takes you through a series of questions and you have to set the receiver to the Astra 2 satellites (not the default) at which point it goes through the frequency range finding several hundred channels (most of which you can’t access). After it has completed the scan you save the configuration. You really need to use the favourites to select the channels you want in the order you want them a slightly time consuming and less than intuitive thing (and the most annoying part of the box). But once you have done all that it works as advertised you can get the FTA BBC and ITV channels and the BBC HD Trial channel perfectly. Again for some reason the BBC HD trial image is pushed to the left but nothing that can’t be dealt with via the screen. Looking between the Sky HD box and the HUMAX HD box on the BBC Trial station there is little to tell the difference between the images so if you want the World Cup in HD these boxes certainly work and are not difficult (but slightly time consuming) to install. Again these boxes are around £300 but you only get the single BBC HD Trial which at the moment isn’t showing much content but will show their World Cup matches and Wimbledon in HD. You also get the BBC and ITV terrestrial feeds but not the C4 or five ones (which are still protected via Sky's security).
If you have a satellite setup with a movable dish or one pointing at 19.2 or elsewhere there are other things to watch so you may find other uses for the box. It certainly reminds me that there are more than just Sky channels up there.
Overall HDTV is here and the extra resolution well worth the money for anyone who has spent money on a big screen 42" or more especially if your screen was one of the more expensive one.
More discussion on HDTV on the SKY HD forum, the satellite forum and the HDTV Equipment forum.
Firstly the installation went fine – I did run foul of the problem with the wrong card being put in the wrong box – after a few calls to Sky they told me that the “Primary” card was the one in my standard digibox and once that was in the HD box all was fine – even better I was happy that I could still see my Sky+ recordings (good as recordings on Sky+ boxes are keyed to the card for playback - change the card and you can't get to your recordings).
Connecting up to my screen was an interesting exercise mainly because I have a 6 year old Pioneer MX-502 Plasma that doesn’t (as is the case with many early plasma screens) do 50Hz HD. I have always been very happy with the SD picture on this screen and so I decided to stick with it and get a scalar to do rate conversion from 50 to 60Hz – I chose Calibre’s, UK designed, Vantage HD after some research. It arrived the same day as Sky HD so I was keeping my fingers crossed that it would work.
The Vantage arrived first and once it had been plugged into my screen and we had checked the menus worked at the correct output resolution we needed a source and I tried my Sony HDV 1080i camcorder. Even with my dodgy camera work the clarity and depth of detail in the background of the image was amazing – enough for my wife to say wow.
When the installer from Sky arrived we initially plugged in the HDMI connection – which I didn’t expect to work – as Calibre correctly follow the HDCP rules and so without a terminating HDCP screen it shouldn’t handshake correctly. It didn't work. Next we plugged in the analogue component HD connection and all was fine. We then calibrated the picture to be centred – there was a definite left shift between the BBC HD broadcasts and the Sky ones.
Next we then looked at the different input and output options and after very little time we worked out that the best solution was to have the Sky HD box output the original broadcast format (1080i) and for the scalar to convert to the screens 720p resolution – we also tried sending 1080i out but it was quite obvious that the modern Vantage HD did a better job of 1080i to 720p than the 6 year old screen (not that surprising considering the amount of processor power in the vantage HD). Finally we looked at the colour balance / brightness and contrast – hard to do without a set of HD colour charts etc but one has to make do. The initial settings were very bright and slightly red but with a bit of fiddling we got to something that looked OK. But it has needed more tweaking over the following days to get something that I am happy with.
The initial reaction from the Sky installers when we started watching the Cricket was how good the picture was and I was also much more impressed with the cricket than I had been a couple of weeks before when I went to preview the HD service at Sky’s headquarters. But for me that is not the important thing - it is the other programming and how it looks.
I remember when I first hooked up a HD source to my screen many years ago (a US HD-VHS player and some demo tapes) the pictures caused everyone to go wow – but they were demos and when the movies came out the wow wasn’t quite as loud. The thing about HD is that it does, so they say, have 4 times the amount of information as a SD picture and in a brightly lit demo of buildings or scenery it is jaw-droppingly beautiful but when you are watching an episode of 24 or a sci fi movie that takes place in the dark the depth of detail available is harder to see.
There is definitely a difference but some of the content, if you compare the same broadcast side by side, is less noticeable than you might have thought. Not that I would want to go back to the SD versions – this is made worse if you have a good screen that deals well with SD images as the ultimate resolution of most screens will be the limiting factor, i.e. it is higher for SD and lower for HD. Both are being manipulated by the electronics to work with a screen that at the moment in the market are mainly 720p (1270x720) there are 1080 screens coming but they are less common and there are screens with lower resolutions.
The first thing you notice comparing a scene recorded in each mode (on different boxes) is that unless you have the same colour / brightness / contrast rendition the things that you will find annoying in the picture will be the colour or brightness and not the resolution. But as you can see below in the worst case of a dark scene in 24 below an SD image
As you can see the picture is slightly soft all over but you only realise why when you see the HD version:
When you realise that the plane is in focus and on the HD image the plane is crisp and in focus while “Audrey” is slightly out of focus.
Here are another couple of images:
And the other version:
These were both taken with the same camera and screen one from a Sky+ box and the other from a SkyHD box the HD one has more detail and is sharper.
Obviously still images don’t really tell the tale but it does show some of the core differences. Some scenes compare even less favourably and some are so blindingly different that you wouldn’t ever go back to the old version. But what is most noticeable is that the “difference” is, not surprisingly, in the detail. When people say HD is so much better (or not) you have to look at it and think “what is better?” What is different is the level of detail that you can see – which is why people talk about standing closer to HD screens; the reality is that you have an image with more information in it and so to get the best out of it and to resolve the detail you need to be closer to the image.
The HD box itself isn’t perfect - as the comments on the forum make out - but so far mine hasn’t been too badly behaved. Is the content worth the extra £10 a month (plus the £299 for the box)? Well, that is always a hard one to answer and everyone’s view of value is different. The core value is in the movies and sport but at the moment there aren’t enough entertainment channels / content in HD. What is a pity is that with the small number of movie channels available that Sky haven’t used the “extra” disk space to launch a movies on demand service with a mix of movies from HD9/10 and SBO HD1/2 that are downloaded when the box isn’t doing anything else. It would add a great deal of value to the HD proposition for movie lovers as at the moment you have to record the movies you want and hope that it doesn’t clash with other recordings you want to make. Either that or they need to implement the “show me the next showing of…” option so you can see a movie is playing and find out when it is next playing at the touch of a single button – so you can find another time to record it.
But overall Sky’s HD service does deliver and work as it is supposed to and the improved quality is going to be great over the summer. And to answer my own question, if you are a movie fan (where this is the only sensible HD source at present) or a sports fan the £10 a month is very reasonable.
Of course if you don’t have Sky HD yet or your box isn’t going to be with you until after the World Cup, is there anything you can do?
The answer is that as the BBC's transmissions are FTA, if you are really keen you can get a FTA HD receiver. I had a play with the Humax HDCI2000 (there is also the PACE DS810XE). The Humax arrived and I unpacked it without any fuss until I received an email reminding me that to get the BBC broadcast I needed to download new software via a null modem cable (something that your independent satellite installer should do for you). Fortunately I have a null modem cable but it wouldn’t have been something I had except for the fact that I used it for controlling a TiVo many years ago and more recently for checking the serial consoles on our servers here at Digital Spy. Once I had connected up the cable downloading the new software was painless enough. And I then took the box upstairs to connect it to the satellite dish and screen. Firstly the box I had came with a European power plug (again the ones in the UK distribution channel will have UK 3 pin plugs) but that was easy to deal with and I plugged in the satellite lead from my old Sky box and the HDMI cable into the back of my scalar and switched on. Hey presto it worked (no HDCP handshake here causing problems).
The startup takes you through a series of questions and you have to set the receiver to the Astra 2 satellites (not the default) at which point it goes through the frequency range finding several hundred channels (most of which you can’t access). After it has completed the scan you save the configuration. You really need to use the favourites to select the channels you want in the order you want them a slightly time consuming and less than intuitive thing (and the most annoying part of the box). But once you have done all that it works as advertised you can get the FTA BBC and ITV channels and the BBC HD Trial channel perfectly. Again for some reason the BBC HD trial image is pushed to the left but nothing that can’t be dealt with via the screen. Looking between the Sky HD box and the HUMAX HD box on the BBC Trial station there is little to tell the difference between the images so if you want the World Cup in HD these boxes certainly work and are not difficult (but slightly time consuming) to install. Again these boxes are around £300 but you only get the single BBC HD Trial which at the moment isn’t showing much content but will show their World Cup matches and Wimbledon in HD. You also get the BBC and ITV terrestrial feeds but not the C4 or five ones (which are still protected via Sky's security).
If you have a satellite setup with a movable dish or one pointing at 19.2 or elsewhere there are other things to watch so you may find other uses for the box. It certainly reminds me that there are more than just Sky channels up there.
Overall HDTV is here and the extra resolution well worth the money for anyone who has spent money on a big screen 42" or more especially if your screen was one of the more expensive one.
More discussion on HDTV on the SKY HD forum, the satellite forum and the HDTV Equipment forum.
More: Tech, Satellite TV
