I found out that Virgin supply HD channels for no added monthly surcharge, when you have a V+ box. Given the added functionality that comes with the V+ also, I have decided to bite the bullet and drop the 100 quid for the upgrade and install. Tomorrow afternoon is D-Day. I am fully prepared with my newly bought HDMI 1.4 cable, and I already have a 1080p ready tv. Am I going to be overwhelmed, or underwhelmed? What has your experience with HD been?
Am I reading this correctly, that you own an HD television, but you never had the HD service hooked up? Cause that’s how your OP reads.
I’m hoping that you decided to updgrade, then went out and bought the HD television.
Either way, you will appreciate the clarity that HD gives versus standard signals.
You read correctly. When my last tv died, I bought a 1080p capable tv, even though I didn’t currently have HD. No point in buying obsolete tech thought I. I am now catching up in that I will actually have some HD channels to watch on it!
You will be overwhelmed. I am guessing you are not in the United States, but look for a show called “Sunrise Earth”. It appears on HD Theater here, an offshoot of the Discovery Channel. It is pure nature eye candy. The show is exactly what the title implies, one hour at sunrise in some location.
For a while, you will watch things that you never would have before. I watched a large part of a golf game when I first got an HD signal.
Sports are where you’ll see the biggest improvement, by some distance, especially in widescreen. As a footy fan you’ll see the difference immediately. Once you’re used to HD it’s hard to watch sports in anything else: not just because of the clarity in picture, but because you’ll see things happening that otherwise would have been just off the edge of the screen.
Even old movies are better in HD. I was watching “North by Northwest” the other day and realized that it was on the regular TCM channel. Switched it to the HD channel and was amazed at the improvement in picture clarity.
I think they’re starting to frame tv shows for 16:9 finally. Even though HD TV shows have been HD for several years, they still grouped everything in the center and chopped the sides off for the 4:3 version. I noticed on House the other night on my parent’s 4:3 TV that people were cut in half while talking. I was surprised it wasn’t letterboxed.
Oh, forgot cooking shows. Find some HD cooking shows, you will be amazed.
Going from standard def to HD is like
-getting corrective lenses to 20/20 vision.
You see the same picture but everything is sharper and crisper and less blurry.
-taking blinders off.
Going from 4:3 to widescreen lets you see more peripherally. Even though you are focused on the center of the screen the sides enhance it. Going back to 4:3 makes me feel like I’m watching with blinders on.
Not to hype it up too much but I can’t help but wonder how I watched TV before HD and found it enjoyable. It’s like looking through a frosted window now.
You’ll put on 20lbs.
I didn’t buy into the HD hype at first; my father went out and bought an HDTV when Brighthouse first started offering the service. I wasn’t that into it; I had a BIG projection TV and as far as I was concerned, I wasn’t going to give up the size of the picture for the quality.
Then I came over to help him with something and the TV was on in the background on some show about the space shuttle. They showed a launch in all of it’s HD goodness as I was walking through the living room, and I caught it out of the corner of my eye. I remember stopping in my tracks and watched it, and just over a whisper said, “wow.” I didn’t know my dad was standing behind me until I heard him say, “Yeah, pretty cool, isn’t it?” Been hooked ever since.
Oh, and get yourself an HD DVR and you’ll never leave the house.
ETA: Sorry if this comes off as condescending but make sure you know where the HD channels are on your receiver/cable box. I’ve seen people get HD TVs and HD cable boxes, and don’t know that they actually have to watch the HD channels. If you’re watching say, Lost on channel 2, it’s it’s going to be way up on “the dial” (more than likely) for the HD broadcast of the same show. I went over to a friends house to watch a football game, and he had his HDTV set up for about two weeks. I noticed the TV was on the normal broadcast channel so I asked him why he wasn’t watching it in HD. His response was, “Whaddaya mean?”
I’d bet dollars to donuts that they were watching a show that was in letterbox, and hit some zoom function “to use their whole screen”, and never set it back to normal.
I don’t know. I can say for sure that SNL (at least the feed that TWC shows here) has been in “pan and scan” format for a while now. The sides were definitely getting cut off and this was on TVs that had no zooming functionality.
OK, install went without a hitch. Haven’t had time to properly sit down and watch it, but I have had a quicj scan around.
ESPN HD, italian football match. Oh yeah that difference is noticeable. It’s going to be a biig improvement over regular ESPN
National Geo - Don’t know what the show was, but a helicopted was flying over the mountains in really bad weather. Yep, amazing picture clarity.
Living HD (cheesy shows such as Charmed etc) - hard to see much improvement here, but then I guess the show hadn’t been filmed in HD
MTV HD - some concert showing - yes very much noticed the difference in picture quality.
So on the whole I am very happy with the upgrade.
Nope, they’ve got an old 4:3 TV. It doesn’t have any stretch or zoom features.
Is it connected to a cable box? I’ve seen cable box remotes with a zoom button.
That sounds right. Directors of shows look through a camera and get a view that is framed like this [ ]. Whatever is in the outer box will be shown in HD 16:9.
People with standard def will view whats in the inner box in 4:3.
Directors tried to keep the focus and relavant stuff in the inner box so 4:3 viewers could enjoy the show. As we move further and further into HD 16:9 and less and less people watch the 3:4 format the directors are starting to ignore that inner box. Thus when you have two people having a conversation in the same frame instead of pushing them together in the scene to fit the in the small box or panning back and forth between the two of them they simply get cut in half at the edges of the screen.