Tuesday, June 27, 2006

HD - not quite there yet

Sky was demoing their SkyHD service in Victoria on Monday. Am not impressed. Surrounded by large and expensive Sony Bravia LCDs, I noticed visible MPEG compression artifacts within the broadcast that were so noticeable during the early years of DVD technology.

While the quality of the transmission seems to be an improvement over standard definition digital telly, it didn't have that impact (on me at least) of say the switch from analog to DVB (or maybe I am too fussy). My guess is watching HD films on broadcast would probably equal to the quality you can get from watching a film on a good DVD player capable of upscaling.

From what I have seen, unless BluRay and/or HD-DVD players start dropping in price (circa 2008?), you probably should hold back from getting a HD telly just yet. HD broadcast isn't mature yet and probably not worth the hassle. But hei, it's your money.

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4 comments:

RichardAM said...

Never too fussed about HDTV, like you say it's far too expensive. As a result I can't see either Sky or BBC HD doing well, at least for another couple of years.

Jon Choo said...

Tell that to Sony/Msoft?

RichardAM said...

Get me J Allard and Ken Kutargi's phone number and I will. ;)

Jon Choo said...

If I knew them I wouldn't be blogging. :)