Quote:
Originally Posted by nialli
I have a four-year-old Toshiba WLT68 32in that's "HD Ready" rather than the full 1080p. With both my SA and Samsung V+ boxes I set them to 720p as I found that best handled fast motion and didn't feel like any kind of HD compromise on that size screen. With the V+ SD channels PQ varied very much depending on the quality of the source; the BBC ones were very good, Sky ones notably poor. The further down the EPG you ventured the weaker the SD results.
With my TiVo I found that it had defaulted to 1080i, and the SD channels were softer and the colours looked artificial - for example, I watched Spectacle on Sky Arts 1 in SD over the weekend and it was particularly soft, almost blurry. Eughh.
So I changed the setting to 720p and the SD improved; Rubicon recorded from BBC4 looked very good indeed, on a par if not slightly better than my Freeview BBC4. The few remaining SD menus on the TiVo looked better too. My recording of Spectacle still looked soft to me, but not quite as bad as when the TiVo was set to 1080i. I then did some switching between the SD and HD versions of ESPN and Film4: I'd say that they appeared very similar to what I had on the Samsung V+.
I think it's pretty subjective and very much depends on which SD channels you watch: the SD bitrates are probably as big an influence as the hardware if you ask me. Of course, having a 32in 720p TV is not going to have the same issues as a larger 1080p display, but then unless you've gone plasma I'd suggest SD is always going to be soft on anything above 40in, regardless of upscaling
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I agree with this. I have a five year-old Pioneer 436XDE, which is HD ready (1024x768). To me HD looks
slightly better on the Tivo (ESPN HD and Skyports HD look eye-popping). SD looks
very slightly softer (more anti-aliasing?) but, as you say, it depends on the channel. I suspect (cynically) that Sky deliberately use a lower bit rate on their SD channels to 'encourage' people to upgrade to their (£10/month extra) HD package.