It’s been about two weeks since I’ve gotten Sky HD. I wasn’t super thrilled with the picture quality at first, but I’ve since been fully converted.
When people in the US would talk about HD, it sounded miraculous. In part, I think that’s because the NTSC standard is lower quality than PAL (see PAL vs NTSC). So for them, the jump from 480 lines to 720 or 1080 was more dramatic than me jumping from the 525 lines of PAL.
Still, my Sky box should be showing me twice the lines of ordinary PAL. Why wasn’t I more impressed initially? I think because it was easy to forget how “bad” old PAL was.
Two things have changed that for me recently. The first was the World Cup. I’ve watched a couple of matches in HD via the BBC, but the last two were on ITV, which isn’t doing HD broadcasts. They were awful. As players moved across the field, they had terrible ghosting around them, MPEG artifacts or blurs that were entirely absent in the HD broadcasts.
The second was having to watch our old television after the Sky HD box oddly decided it wouldn’t record some channels. It would tell you the channel was being recorded on the info bar, but if you went into Sky Planner, nothing was showing as recorded there. A soft reboot — turn the power off, take out the viewing card, turn the power on, then reinsert the viewing card after the system said no viewing card inserted — solved that problem.
Our old TV has our old Sky+ box merrily recording things that were on series link. So we caught up with the last two episode of Desperate Housewives in standard definition. Throughout the program, I kept noticing how I could see the TV scan lines. In the past, the individual lines of the CRT never were that noticeable. But after two weeks of HD, they’re glaring.
