Bitterly Dissapointed With Sky+ HD

rikky · 8 Mar 2010 at 20:53

One last thing to check:
make sure the sky+ connection hasn't defaulted your tv to dynamic settings as the samsung inputs are stored individually and you may have to alter them again for that input... just a thought.

the wopster · 8 Mar 2010 at 21:33

Corasik said:
I definatly get better picture quality on auto on my TV, but thats probably because I have a 1024x786 plasma panels, so scaling 720x576 pal to 1920x1080i an then back down to 1024x768p is a lot of rescalings and it really kills the picture quality. The same is probably true on 1366x768 LCD panels. On the other hand with a fullHD 1920x1080 panel, then the result might be different.

It could also be that most people consider panasonic scalers to be pretty much as good as anything out there, and by comparison the skybox scalers really are rubbish. But a lot of LCD tv's have pretty poor scalers.. So really its best to try all the options and see what combination works best.

PS, Someone else put forward a very valid point, if you use Scart/RGB for standard def viewing, then the skyHD box is actually outputing 576i PAL/RGB, all scalers and deinterlace are disabled, and the TV's doing all the work!. Sky channels generally have a higher bitrate than their cousins on Freeview, so there really is no reason why the picture should be worse, and on the whole I find that freeview looks considerably softer than Sky's SD channels. Just remember to switch to HDMI before watching an HD channel or the box will scale the 1080i source down to 576i resolutions.

over on sky user forums they all say to have it set to auto because almost all tv's ie panasonic,sony,samsung have far better scalers than the sky box and the pic is only getting scaled twice insted of three/four times

oHUTCHYo · 17 Mar 2010 at 12:55

Its been ripped out today guys - despite all of your helpful suggestions, for whatever reason, the picture quality is not a patch on my built-in freeview on the Samsung.

As a bonus, theyve left the dish and wiring installed, so when I upgrade TV next I'll be able to use Freesat as opposed to Freeview

Participant · 17 Mar 2010 at 13:27

Haha, nice workaround getting Freesat installed for nothing!

lunarwolf · 17 Mar 2010 at 15:02

dbmzk1 said:
No, it's not. The picture is a lot better when set to 1080i in 99% of cases.

The reason for this is that all SD material is broadcast at 576i but on auto the box outputs at 576p. That's an issue because while the boxes scaler is not great it's generally on par with most TV sets, the actual problem is that the boxes deinterlacer is crap and your TV will do a much better job. And the only way to force the box to output interlaced goodness at all times is to set it to 1080i.

Plus as an added advantage you don't have to wait for your TV to change resolution every time you change channel, the menu is always in HD and a lot of TV's overscan when not at 1080. The only real downside is that many 4:3 broadcasts will be stretched when set to 1080i.

/fail

unless your TV is utter rubish, I have a kuro and think it scales slightly better than a skybox

Nymins · 17 Mar 2010 at 15:06

lunarwolf said:
/fail

unless your TV is utter rubish, I have a kuro and think it scales slightly better than a skybox

My Panasonic PX80 scales well for every source other than Sky+HD.

I need to have it set to 1080i or else the text on the EPG is really blurry when i switch to a SD program.

Sirrel Squirrel · 17 Mar 2010 at 16:35

Agree, the SD quality on the HD box I have is awful no matter what setting although I get the best results from 1080i. Someone suggested I try using RGB Scart for SD material so I'll give that a go when I find a decent Scart cable.

dbmzk1 · 17 Mar 2010 at 17:54

lunarwolf said:
/fail

unless your TV is utter rubish, I have a kuro and think it scales slightly better than a skybox

Of course it is better, not massively but still better. But this is nothing to do with scaling. Making your Sky box to de-interlace the picture is much worse, as it's absolutely terrible at it. Hence why forcing it to 1080i (the only way to get interlaced over hdmi via the Sky box) is generally better in most cases. Plus it eliminates res changes which take time and are annoying, it makes text much more readable (the EPG, news tickets, etc) as said above and also you don't ever get the EPG in crappy SD mode