Is normal SD Sky transmitted in 1080i and if so would it be

[admin_exported]

better to look at a TV that has Full HD 1920 X 1080 pixel definition.

No one seems to talk about picture quality of normal SKY on HDTV's.......They only ever seem to make reference to either the quality of SKYHD or FREEVIEW... Why is this, when we all know that normal SKYDIGITAL in 10 times better than watching FREEVIEW anyway?

 

[Andrew Everard]

No, normal Sky is standard definition 576i.

 

[mlamb64150]

Believe me, once you've watched a HD broadcast on SKY HD and then go back to watching standard definition you'll realise just how poor the picture actually is!

 

[Anonymous]

There are channels on freeview that are better than their counterparts on sky.... It all depends upon how much bandwidth is given to each channel by the broadcaster.

Also, when Sky HD boxes are sending 1080i HDMI to your TV, you are relying on the Sky HD box to deinterlace 576i SD channels into 576p, and to then scale and reinterlace to 1080i again. The processing inside the box is quite poor and in some cases is making the image worse than it should be.

My tip - with a decent quality display e.g. something with a Faroudja DCDi processor, run an RGB scart cable from your Sky HD box to an RGB scart socket on the TV and see how it performs with SD. Depending on the quality of your TV you may find less artefacts this way.... Examples of TVs that work well with this are Pioneer and Fuji plasmas.