Do you mind giving us a review of HD movies, if there are any avaliable tonight that aren't upscaled?

Posted by: Anonymous | May 22, 2006 6:39 PM

Just add the HD channels to your favourites.

Just watched Shrek 2 HD ...... Awesome !!

Posted by: plasmad00d | May 22, 2006 9:13 PM

Also watched Shrek 2 - looked good, but then it looked good in SD - I wouldn't say that the HD movies I have seen so far are that much better than DVD. Other stuff, such as the BBC HD Preview is far more impressive IMO

Posted by: Mr Bump | May 22, 2006 9:36 PM

Not that imprest with SkyHD which I had installed today, the picture quality is only slightly better. Not that much improvement that Sky & the media where telling us all. Look before you buy.

Posted by: Andy | May 22, 2006 11:39 PM

I'm glad Sky arn't fiddling with the user interface or remote. They are both very good, and easy to use. If it ain't broke don't fix it!

Posted by: Pete | May 23, 2006 12:05 AM

Andy, maybe you have hay fever - get some optrex - HD is way above 'slightly better' than SD - take no notice - this is real HD and it is the nuts! All of the movies I have checked ar real HD not upscaled - 24 looks great (real HD) - some artsworld is real HD and other material is scaled SD - National Geographic looks amazing, there is an incredible quality documentary about the singapore dockyards - a lot of material on all the channels is repeated constantly - this is a great start!

Posted by: Simon Harris | May 23, 2006 12:35 AM

One other annoying thing - the remote control frequency is almost the same as the Sky Plus - the new Sky HD remote does not control the old Sky Plus, but the Sky plus remote does control the Sky HD - this will be confusing if you have both boxes and they are situated near each other, if you want to only control the old Sky Plus there is no way to stop the Sky HD responding to the remote signals . . . . when the engineer did the card pairing it was very difficult to het both boxes to display the system details screen because the boxes were responding to the wrong remotes.

Posted by: Simon Harris | May 23, 2006 4:25 AM

I was expecting the whole thing to be good, but it has exceeded my expectations. Stunning. All HD channels look great, and the Movies look massively better than DVD.

Posted by: Mark | May 23, 2006 7:49 AM

I must admit I haven't been totally blown away by the movies. Sure they look great but maybe the difference between a decent DVD and hd is smaller than that between tradiotnal sd transmissions and HD.

I do agree though that National Geo is the best thing on there in terms of picture quality. Amazing

Posted by: Ashley | May 23, 2006 8:56 AM

"Accessing the HD channels is a pain"
how lazy are you?
it only takes 2 button presses (TV Guide, red), the same as it does to look at the SD channels (TV Guide, select)

"If you go for the latter there is a small trade off in terms of resolution but it generally does deliver a smoother picture."
you forgot the all important "In my opinion" because of you read AVForums and digispy forums then you'll see most people have the opposite view

Posted by: Maff Mace | May 23, 2006 11:26 AM

I would say it's best to leave the 1080i/720p setting on automatic so that it correctly switches when the native resolution flags it to - I tried 720p on some material and it looked slightly softer. I am viewing it quite critically via an HDMI connection on a Panasonic high definition 50 inch industrial plasma and there is a slight difference.

Posted by: Simon Harris | May 23, 2006 11:49 AM

Having just switched from TiVo, I found that there are a couple of niggles when using this sky box:
- Can't do single frame fwd/rev
- When you ffwd/rev and hit play after the adverts, tivo would take you back a couple of seconds (for reaction time) - Sky doesn't
- Can only specify the first letter when searching the a-z listing - if the second letter is towards the end of the alphabet, it takes ages
- No confirmation on delete of recorded programmes

- My box crashes when trying to rewind live tv. This may just be my box though.

Even so, it's worth it for the HD picture quality :)

Posted by: Kevin James | May 23, 2006 3:55 PM

FAO Kevin, there's nothing new there, they are all what Sky+ was like (except the crashing which seems to be your box). Lots of TiVo users spout off about how good TiVo was, they just need to get over the fact that they're not supported in the UK anymore, Sky is at the forefront of PVR here in the UK

Posted by: Maff Mace | May 23, 2006 4:12 PM

FAO Matt, I totally agree - for the record, TiVo was great technology but their business side sucked - the problem was always that it required a second box, incurring extra expense and extra signal degradation due to more encode/decode steps. I have friends who have Sky+, and I was just thinking it would have been nice to release some UI tweaks with the HD box to make it a little nicer to use, is all. I agree that Sky+ is up there at the top of the PVR list, but then again they don't have much competition if you don't want an extra box sitting under your TV

Posted by: Kevin James | May 23, 2006 6:29 PM

I had Tivo, the great thing about it was the programme listings and the search which made it easy to find anything, also the interface was far better than Sky and no series links were needed to record a whole series of any show - I am surprised that Sky has not improved the Sky plus interface much generally because Tivo was way better. Of course Sky has other advantages especially the 2 tuners and now of course HD.

Posted by: Simon Harris | May 24, 2006 4:46 AM

Not too impressed so far. Probably because of the little HD content available.

Posted by: David Kaspar | May 24, 2006 12:21 PM

easy fix for the channel selection.....set all the hd channels up as your favourites and then just press the blue button without having to access the epg....simple

Posted by: garry | May 24, 2006 7:15 PM

The HD channels are great but what I dont like is the crashing of the box and when I change channels it is not a smooth transition. I get a break in the sound and the picture comes and then goes blue/black for 1 or 2 seconds. Bought a better quality HDMI cable (1m) but no differance. I am thinking of returning the HD box as it is not value for money. I am waiting for a reply from the TV manufacter. (Dell) Everything was fine prior to HD being installed

Posted by: Dave Hackett | June 2, 2006 7:02 PM

my installation was a nightmare,two guys arrived said hi mate never seen one of these before and commenced to pull the cables on my sky+ after about 30 seconds one of the chuckle brothers said any idea where this goes (hdmi cable)next thing they were on their way out the door saying you should get your card updated in 30mins cheers mate. i have sice spent 3 evenings setting up the system with sky,not to mention about 4 hours on the phone,was it all worth it, probably

Posted by: roy | June 4, 2006 4:18 PM

Overall I am very pleased with my HD service and pic quality. However, when coupled to my Pioneer 43" Plasma, 6th generation screen with 720 format HD res I noticed that I get a higher quality std def digital picture from my terrestrial aerial. This is evident on all free to view digital channels viewed from my aeirel feed and not Sky HD box. It is evident that the processing of the signal by sky equipment is not as good as that from the Pioneer TV processor. I now use the terrestrial feed for free to view channels!

Posted by: RM | June 21, 2006 1:43 PM

Had HD for over 3 weeks now and I agree with the comments that it's the nature & sports channels which show HD off to its best.

The box is a nightmare tho. The x30 FF (fast forward) doesn't work (it's x12 cos I can drop down to x12 and it's no slower). When FF, I can hit play and it will take at least 3 seconds to respond (quicker if I use pause instead). I can press the green button and nothing will happen, other buttons work fine then the green button works again.

Other than that, for me (coming from a standard sky box) the best thing about it is the sky+ functionality. Bring on more HD channels.

Posted by: LeeM | June 23, 2006 10:41 PM

I'm waiting for my HD installer to call and I have a panasonic vierra 42" mounted on the wall, 3.5 metre cable distance from where the HD box will be sited. I guess that the HDMI cable supplied by Sky will only be a 1m so is it worth spending mega bucks on a quality 5 metre HDMI or go for the offers on the web, £15`ish. Digital signals cannot degrade ( on or off ) so why pay out?

Posted by: Colin | August 29, 2006 12:58 PM

Has Sky HD in for three days now and the sports programmes are no different at all. Went into Comet. Their TV had a crap normal picture but a great HD one. Our Panasonic Viera has a great picture in all cases but the sports is no better on HD. When I phoned Sky, all they could tell me to do was look at the Geog channels. The man admitted the sport was no better. Unless you want to look at animals all day not worth the money.

Posted by: jon | September 2, 2006 12:33 PM

not too keen on the black borders top and bottom on moviechannels .cannot remove them using zoom function on tv when using hdmi feed.

Posted by: JOHN BEASLEY | September 13, 2006 7:43 PM

The Sky HD box shows everything, HD or standard, in widescreen. This means that films, shows etc. normally shot in 4:3 are displayed in 16:9, which stretches the picture horizontally and reduces it vertically. This is very annoying! The "screen format" button on my Sony remote, which used to change screen format when I had NTL, cannot operate with the Sky HD box. Sky say, essentially, "That's how it is". The Sony people agree. They have suggested using a Scart lead as well as HDMI. They say by flipping to the Scart AV1 input, this problem will be solved. To look at HD programs, I would switch to AV4. Has anyone tried this, or are there other solutions?

Posted by: elias antar | September 15, 2006 6:54 PM

I heard a rumour that Sky are finding it too difficult to broadcast in HD (via their Sky+HD channels) hence alot of content is goes out in low resolution 480, 720 (not 1080) - they don;t think anyone will know

Posted by: Chris, Watford | January 29, 2007 11:39 PM

This is really important to say this. Set the box to 1080i. Never put it on Automatic as then it won't UPSCALE standard definiton channels. You will also find that you don't get the annoying sound problems when changing channels from HD to SD. The reason you are getting different picture sizes on different channels is not the Sky HD box doing this, is the HDMI cable. They all have Automatic Format Adjustment built into the cable. Also, that free HDMI cable that comes with Sky HD is terrible! I upgraded mine to a very high quality cable and the difference was tremendous, especially on a larger screen. The common talk of "HDMI doesn't make a difference as its digital 1's and 0's" is a big mistake. HDMI is not all about 1's and 0's. With more channels coming soon, this box is superb!

Posted by: Rich | May 15, 2007 5:41 PM

I've just installed Sky HD and while the HD channels look great, the SD channel look pretty bad. I'm sure that the picture quality from my old Sky+ box was better than the SD picture from my new HD box.

Posted by: Graham | August 14, 2007 10:29 AM

Hi guys, I'm a little stuck for answers and the web is no help at the moment.
Just ordered a Samsung 40" full hd tv, so obviously the standard sky is gonna look s**t, just wondering if its worth getting sky hd. What I really want to know is: can it UPSCALE the normal channels like my DVD player does to DVDs?
Thanks

Posted by: xavier | August 25, 2007 9:43 PM

Rich, if HDMI is not just about 1's and 0's what is it about? HDMI is a digital interface. As such there is no variation in quality - you either get the full picture or you don't, it's either perfect or blocking and freezing/non existent. The only benefit a higher quality cable will give you is the ability to run at a higher frequency or have a longer cable. If you need a 5M cable then spend a bit more on quality but if you are getting a steady picture at 1080i from your HD box using your cheap 1M lead then it's not going to improve by getting a £60 lead.
You are correct about upscaling, but the question you have to ask is whether your TV has a better upscaling engine than the SkyHD box. If you set the Sky box to 1080i then it will do the upscaling but if you set it to automatic then your TV will do it (when necessary) - my TV is better at upscaling so I have my SkyHD box set on automatic.
IMO the football on Sky Sports HD is the best example of HD in its full glory - fantastic

Posted by: Chris, Yateley | October 2, 2007 1:23 PM