Well for once, on these kind of forums, I'm glad to see
bowfer hasn't taken my rebutle of his claims personally, which happens far too often these days (not necessarily on here). Nice one fella! :icon_thumright: Anyway, enough of the niceties... time to rip his reply apart!
bowfer said:
Well,I can assure you my SD picture is not sh!t
Sorry, I didn't mean sh!t sh!t, just not-as-good-as-it-could-be sh!t. And I was referring to digital not analogue (if you live in a good reception area and have decent quality cables SD analogue will always be better than SD digital as it doesn't suffer the curse of compression)
bowfer said:
and has improved dramatically since I went from SKY+/scart to HD/HDMI.
This kind of stands to reason, of course its going to be better, or was it a deliberate mistake? Kind of like saying Punto/95ron to Enzo/98ron! (or something like that!)
bowfer said:
I used to get a helluva lot of artifacts and noise through SKY+/scart,which have all disappeared since going down the HDMI route.
Again, this speaks for itself. Artifacts would be courtesy of SD Sky+ compression and noise due to digital to analogue conversion process and scart cables. Of course this will would all dissappear with a switch to HDMI (presumably with a HD source). For a start HDMI, being a digital medium, doesn't suffer from 'noise' in the traditional sense and as HDMI can shift huge amounts of data rapidly a HD 'source' is less compressed than a SD source (that's why we're having the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wars as the higher storage capacity of these discs is needed to store the less compressed source), so there go your artifacts! This still doesn't change viewing a SD source via HDMI on a HDTV, granted you will get little or no noise (due to the signal remaining purely digital) but the artifacts of compression will still be there!
bowfer said:
I would also venture that if you think SD football is terrible,you haven't seen it on the Toshiba LT68 range. No problems with fast camera pans at all.
Actually I think football in general is terrible, but thats a whole other can of worms! I admit I have no experience (to my knowledge) of the LT68 range but I can assure you that, again, the SD compression artifacts will still always be there even on a HDTV via HDMI. I used football and fast camera pans as an example but the artifacts of a SD compressed source are highly visible in a lot of things (particularly in areas of high contrast or rapidly moving objects) no matter what your combination of TV or cables are. The artifacts are due to the way the compression methods work and how much the original signal has been compressed. TV broadcasters and DVD makers can choose the compression rate (much like you and I can with MP3s etc) at which to compress the source by to squeeze as much capacity out of the digital TV networks (for all those 'press the red button for more info' adverts) or to fit even more onto DVD's (useless commentaries with the barely-there extra who died in the third scene, bloopers, biographies, alternative endings, interviews with the producer who's fed up with being the guy who's really in charge while the director gets all the glory (Joel Silverman and Jerry Bruckheimer spring to mind) etc).
In no way do I presume any of this to be the fault of the TVs themselves and I'm sure they make the best of what SD signal they are given. Think of it this way; Stick dodgy fuel in an Enzo and, no matter how great the car is, you ain't gonna get what its really capable of.
bowfer said:
You can only suck it and see but plenty of people report their SD picture improves dramatically through HDMI.
I think 'dramatically' is a little too, erm, dramatic. Once again, see above! But if you, or plenty of people, do not notice the compression artifacts of an digital SD source then you are lucky... I can't even watch The Simpsons (digital SD) viewed on a 42" Samsung HDTV via HDMI!
bowfer said:
My own tests with an upscaling HDMI DVD (not blueray) versus a component/progressive DVD player have also shown that there is an improvement through HDMI.
Again this would be due to the lack of digital to analogue conversion process. I don't have to repeat myself do I?
So to conclude, after all that... were both right, but I'm more right than you, so technically, I win!