HD, Blu Ray, HDMI and the unanswered question - WHY?

Question

Me and three Uni. mates have recently come home from a year working in Japan and decided to rent a place together. So we got all our stuff out of storage and, after a month of celebrating our return, moving in, and just about every other excuse we could think of ,it was finally time to set up the TV properly in time for the NHL playoffs.

This caused a problem - between the four of us, our living room looked like the tv section at pcworld, and worse, the girls had better kit than the guys. Now obviously there is nothing wrong with that, but male bonding was needed to restore the man-pride - a weekend mission to find and buy the best set up we could afford, and as a house of hockey nuts this was seen as an investment. Then there was a problem - my flatmate wanted us to get a hdmi cable that cost 1/5th the cost of the tv. Even I thought this was madness, Oddly the commission based sales assistant disagreed.

I lost. We helped that sales assistant pay for his degree. But not being one to give in, and having little else to do that afternoon, we agreed to test all the kit - how bigger difference do you actually get from HD?

We tested all our connections, blu rays, dvds, scarts, hdmi's, you name it, it was there - our pride and joy in a sea of cables, and the difference? well what was the point?
1) up-scaling dvd player - the picture through the scart connector and the hdmi was the same.

2) blu ray player - played dvds exactly the same as the dvd player, played blu rays really well, but there wasn't a great difference in picture over the dvd and the sound was exactly the same to our ears. Don't get me wrong - blu ray looked better... but worth the money difference? no way.

4) The ps3 - composite and HDMI looked better than scart, but the same as each other and the scart picture wasn't that bad - you'd never sit there thinking 'I need to improve this'.

HD tv - this was the one area that mattered - compare a hd flat screen to the old crt and the difference was huge - what ever you connected, the picture looked better in every single way over our older tvs and non- hi def flat screens.

It surprised both of us how little 'noticeable' difference there was. I think we'd both got sucked into the hype about it all at the moment, and i was wondering if anyone else has got their new kit home and been surprisingly underwhelmed? - don't get me wrong, like I said, the TV is amazing, and all the HD bits that go with it are better, they just aren't a 'how did we cope before' moment.

So have you been disappointed like us? or do you think i'm wrong and hi def changed you're life?

Answer 1

I AGREE WITH YOU.sorry about the caps,there is to much hype about the benefits of HD tv ,picture is better but not as good as i expected or was led to believe it was, i use the Sky dish and the HD box but not greatly impressed with it , however when i go onto the Freeview channels the picture is a vast improvement, and to date this area is not fully upgraded for the Freeview, another thing i found out is ,check your signal input channel on your HD- TV, I was advised to do this by a Sky engineer and change the input channels until i got a sign telling me i was on 1080 dpi as this is the channel for using the HD with, if you are using the scart lead,your tv will automatically go onto AV input mode,but if you switch it to the 1080 dpi HD input channel there is a vast difference in the picture and sound, my TV is a Sharp HD 1080 ready set and channel input no 5 is the only one which shows me i am getting the full HD signal ,it can get bloody confusing at the best of times,good luck with it.

Answer 2

First off you did not do any research before jumping to your purchase and you let the salesperson do the guide to the product they store wants to sell you. Also you did not mention what brand and model of products you purchased. DVD player have a resolution of 480P and have 5.1 surround sound when connected to a receiver. The blu ray disc player is at 108P and have 7.1 loss less audio, but you must use the HDMI cable. Component cable (3 RCA jack at one end with 3 colors is for video connection and can handle up to 720P, for audio you need an optical cable to get the surround sound. If you have a tv that is smaller than a 46" you are not going to see a difference between 720P and 1080P. 480P are available in dvd only, 720P are tv programs that are in HD if not they are at 480P, 1080P are from blu ray disc movies and some video games only. Listening to the tv between dvd and blu ray, you are not going to hear any difference in sound quality. HDMI cable are all the same, it is the material they use is the difference, if you purchase a bargain price product and purchase a high end cable does not make any sense. The same thing goes when buying speakers. Go online to home theater magazine and read the reviews by experts on anything you want to know. Hope this will help you out.

Answer 3

Two issues:



- The size of the display. A smaller screen does not show as much difference as a larger display or a projector.



- Source: A BluRay disk from a BluRay player using a HDMI cable is true HD. But it is really easy to THINK you are looking at HD but you are looking at standard def. Using a SVideo cable, a TV station in HD but showing an old movie is up-converted and does not look so good. A DVD in a BluRay player is also up-converted.