Is there a noticeable difference between HD-Ready and Full HD for freeview or Sky?

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Wills1

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#89147 26-Aug-2011 10:47

I currently have a Panasonic plasma which is HD ready. And watch Sky and Freeview programs in what appears to be HD.

If I upgraded the TV would freeview look better than it does on my current tv or about the
same?

Wade

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#512329 26-Aug-2011 10:51

Not really as Sky does not broadcast in 1080P

You may even find that you get a better looking picture on a 720P display on the SD channels as some of the more compressed programs look pretty bad on a 1080P display from personal experience

richms

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#512384 26-Aug-2011 11:58

Depends on how close you are and what processing the TV you get to replace it offers.

If you are so close that it looks like a screendoor, then more pixels will make that go away.

If you are 5-6m away, then probably not.

Richard rich.ms

sbiddle

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#512385 26-Aug-2011 12:06

576i content (ie SD) will typically look better on a HD ready panel (720p) rather than a full HD 1920x1080 panel. This is simple maths - the image has to be scaled to fit a bigger resolution, so upscaling a 720x576 image to fit a 1280x720 or 1366x768 screen vs a 1920x1080 screen will result in bigger pixels on the full HD panel, in much the same way blowing up a small JPEG to fit a screen results in blockiness.

bazzer

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#512390 26-Aug-2011 12:12

sbiddle: 576i content (ie SD) will typically look better on a HD ready panel (720p) rather than a full HD 1920x1080 panel. This is simple maths - the image has to be scaled to fit a bigger resolution, so upscaling a 720x576 image to fit a 1280x720 or 1366x768 screen vs a 1920x1080 screen will result in bigger pixels on the full HD panel, in much the same way blowing up a small JPEG to fit a screen results in blockiness.

There's nothing mathematical about what you just said. In fact, assuming the screen size is the same, I wouldn't expect the image quality to be much different. Your JPEG analogy is incorrect because you are essentially talking about "zooming in" on the original image. This may be the case, going from 29" to 42" HD Ready to 60" Full HD but it's not clear if that's the OP's case.

I don't think the generalisation you made is necessarily correct for two TVs of the same size, one HD Ready and one Full HD. If all the pixels we're talking about are the same size then sure, each original pixel will need to be mapped to more pixels = potentially worse image, but I don't think it's as cut and dried as you make it out to be.

fahrenheit

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#512492 26-Aug-2011 14:01

1080i native programming will look vastly superior. There is also plenty of 720p content sourced from overseas which both networks upscale to 1080i for broadcast.
On a 1080p panel, you will be able to distinguish the difference between these, but on a 720p panel, they'll both look like 720p + suffer overscanning.

bfginger

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#512553 26-Aug-2011 15:21

"HD Ready" is a marketing term that doesn't really make sense anymore. We don't know what model of television you have and whether you're watching in HD or not but I can say I wouldn't buy a 768p plasma panel and the ones I have seen have usually been extremely unimpressive. There are few real 720p televisions, usually they're 768p which means they have to scale 720p content too.

HD needs Freeview from a UHF aerial or Sky from a MySkyHD box, and in most cases an HDMI connection too.

Assuming an extremely high scaler quality, 576i content should look better on a 1080p panel than a 768p panel because there are more pixels to recreate the image into. If it looks better on a 768p panel then that says something about the scaler.