Currently working for a charity who help schools with the extended schools agenda. Love cinema, all ...
Currently working for a charity who help schools with the extended schools agenda. Love cinema, all sorts of music, 360 and rock climbing.
Member since:08.01.2007
Reviews:13
Members who trust:4
Sky HD
I'm writing this review as I watch a blue screen that says "There is a technical fault with this channel Please try later" Oh well I was only watching sky news anyway, watching as our very own David Beckham rakes in the money as he moves to LA for an unbelievable 1million a week before tax. Well done becks nice one!!!
Anyway my review today will be on SKY's HD service in particular the box itself. I will try not to make my review in any way by the fact I have SKY blue screen of death in front of me. "Switch it off at the wall and wait 10 seconds"
YES I'VE TRIED THAT grrrrrr
Hehe anyway
I decided to get sky hd last march time in readiness for the world cup in the summer so I have had a 6 months with the service and feel pretty comfortable writing my feelings. The sky HD service provides you at the moment with a handful of channels, which does include sky sports and sky movies and sky one hd. I'll go into the channels in a little more detail later. First up is the subscription details.
###SUBSCRIPTION### (as at time of writing review) I started with the mix 6 last year which would cost £22 normally per month. So when I upgraded to SKY HD I had to pay the following £299 for the box (not on offer in March 2006) An extra £10 a month for the HD broadcast .
This set up would only give me the HD channels that correspond with my package i.e mix 6, which would give me : SKY ONE HD BBC HD History
HD Discovery HD National Geographic HD Sky Box Office 1 HD Sky Box Office 2 HD
The box also comes with the sky plus features but to access this you would need a sky plus subscription which would be another: £10 a month. So to tally up so far for mix 6 it would cost £42 a month plus £299 to go HD with sky plus. What was pleasing is that if you subscribe to the sky sports package (£10 a month) you get the sky plus features for free. So obviously I did which adds to my HD pleasure Sky Sports 1 HD Sky Sports 2 HD Also access to Premiership Plus HD if you want to pay the extra.
Now you can pay extra again and pay for movies to get the full subscription and the full compliment of HD channels. If done so you would get the two HD channels
Sky Movies 9 HD Sky Movies 10 HD
TO MAKE IT SIMPLE If you have sky plus and a subscription already its normally an extra £10 a month. Once signed up you can ask them to use your old box to have as an extra room, but again they charge for the multiroom service which is normally an extra £10 a month. You wonder where sky get all their money from
###INSTALLATION### I have to say the service level was very good. I ordered in the pre-order time in the spring and yes there was a delay but I did still get it in time for the world cup (in fact it was installed on the first day of the world cup). The engineer worked tidily and quickly and was rather pleasant. He was finished in around 2 hrs and tidied up after himself. He made sure everything was working including things like my dvd recorder and dvd player so my scarts were in the right sockets etc. Nice one SKY. They were on time and polite so all in all a big thumbs up to sky on that one.
###Cables### You shouldn't need any extra cables the sky hd box comes with its own HDMI cable, which is the preferred connection type obviously. If you don't have a HD tv then you have to use scart but then you wouldn't be getting SKY HD then would you.
###THE BOX### The box definitely has a nice design, its slick matt black finish looks nice under most tvs, it is quite bulky and does need quite a bit of room, it's comparable to a dvd recorder or a desktop workstation pc. The front has a number of sexy LED's including a nice glowy neon blue ring which rotates when you are using the sky plus features to playback. You also have some basic controls at the front to work your way round the menus just incase your remote control packs in. It also has a viewing card slot and interactive card slot at the front to (as standard)
The back is a whole different ball game. They have well an truly confused the living hell out of me. Now you have the expected on the back like SCART and HDMI, (Your basic connections for your audio and video signal). You also have your basic audio connections like RCA out and 5.1 optical out for surround sound. Which is all very good. The confusing bit (well I am easily confused) is the inclusion of the USB port and Ethernet port. Now I reckon the USB port is for future upgrades and I'll tell you why I think that in a minute. The Ethernet port I reckon is for interactive service via broadband (i.e plug it into your router) which I can only guess they will offer at a later date. There is also the usual telephone port so you can dial sky to purchase pay per view stuff.
The build quality is good. In fact feels very well built a lot better than the old Amstrad, pace skyreceivers that they spew out to their customers. A very nice and tidy box. Well done SKY.
The only downfall is that the built n hard drive is only 160GB which at first sounds a lot but when you start recording HD content (the only way to record HD content is on your box, until HD recorders come out that is) you will see that 160GB doesn't go very far. A HD movie takes up roughly 10% of the space available so quite a bit. Particularly as the HD offering gets bigger, it would be fair to say that in 12 months time all the big tv stations will be transmiting in HD, so this 160gb hard drive will be an issue. I would like to think that SKY have though about this and have included the USB port for possible future expansion with an external hard drive etc.
###THE PICTURE AND SOUND QUALITY### I have a Samsung 32" LCD which is connected via the HDMI cable provided by sky. I've got to say the first time you sit down in front of a HD broadcast and watch something like Planet Earth on BBC HD it is simply breathtaking. The picture quality is amazing. You find your self repeatedly saying "I can't get over how clear it is" . It is an amazing jump, they say it is like looking out of a clean window instead of a smeary one. The audio is just as good, the great thing about HDMI is that it can carry all the signals so its pretty clear. Its still a lot better to pipe the audio off to a surround sound amp using the fibre optic input. You will find you get a fantastic transition. Picture quality is quite difficult to criticise at the moment as the only alternative is the Telewest HD offering and again its rather sexy looking so thumbs up to both I guess.
###THE BUGS### Yep the bugs, this is the bit when I tell about the things that go wrong, hence the blue screen Actually the blue screen that I was telling you about at the start was merely a weather issue and it has now come back since typing this. The biggest problem I get is when recording or playing back HD content. The box has the tendency of locking up and rebooting in the middle of playback mainly it has done it while recording and just watching but its mainly when I am playing back. And only when HD is involved. This is obviously very irritating. When I want to catalogue stuff to disc I have wasted a number of discs where I set to record and it fails half way through. I have phoned sky a couple of times and spoken to their tech team who have said it's a known issue and they are waiting for the next batch of boxes to come out. I have had this 6 months now so I guess that isn't very good.
###SUMMARY### To summarise I have to say that HD is great but the channel offering is pretty poor with only BBC HD and SKY HD offering the premium content. BBC HD is getting very good, it was especially good around Christmas, shows like Robin Hood, Torchwood and Planet Earth being shown in HD and also movies such as Kill Bill and Mission Impossible in HD. Nice… However putting the bugs aside it's a lot of money to be paying for the privilege and it might be worth waiting another 6 months until the content is better. If you like sports and especially football, watching premiership football in HD is excellent so you may find that's its worth the investment just for that.
Anyway I hope you have enjoyed the review I'm sure I will update in the near future.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Advantages: Beautiful colours, very dark black colours, works well with standard SKY+ and HD Upscalers Disadvantages: Sometimes blurry on fast-paced action movies or older films. MoviePlus isn't all that great.
eeyore220376 09.01.2008 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
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