I have a Sony Bravia kdl-22ex302 TV in my living room and currently use it with a Topfield PVR. I'm told the Topfield doesn't do HD and that to see HD on my Sony I need a PVR which does HD. I see that I could get a Digital Stream DHR8206U for around £80 and that this can do HD.
Am I right in thinking that if I got the DS PVR I could see HD on my TV? Also is HD worth bothering with on a 22" TV?

I think you need a bigger TV

I'm happy with 22".

Unless you are sitting on top of the TV you will not see any great improvement going HD ...
But if you want it get yourself a Freeview HD + pvr . Or a you view box...

The official definition of HD is a vertical resolution of a minimum of 720 lines compared to SD's maximum of 576 lines.

The original TV's had to be capable of displaying the following broadcast formats with a minimum display format of 720 lines.

720p 1280 x 720 at 50 fps in a progressive format
1080i 1440 x 1080 or 1920 x 1080i at 25fps

The two are roughly equivalent, the doubled framerate of 720p gives less motion artefacts that compensates for the lower number of pixels.

To gain any advantage from such a small TV you would need to sit very close to the TV.

Full-HD (retina) tablets give a superb picture (You view these from a very close distance).

How far away do you sit from such a tiny TV ?

About 3 metres.

Not surprised you can't see any difference. If you get a HD box, chances are you would really struggle to read the epg which being designed for display on a HD TV of a size that most with average eyesite could easily read. You need to understand the on screen overlays from a HD TV channel assume you have a TV that at least is within the ability of mere humans to resolve at reasonable viewing distances.

The epg is overlaid on the picture at a resolution of 1920 a 1080 pixels. At 3M on your TV the text will be very tiny. Even someone that does not need to go to specsavers will find it very hard to read (think last line on the opticians chart )

Basically if you want a HD box connected by HDMI you need at least a 32" TV, or more likely a 40" TV.

Thanks for the advice. It seems I wouldn' t benefit from an HD PVR.

On the contrary, you would benefit from a vastly superior picture if you had a reasonable size TV, you just don't realise it. Your TV is so small, it reminds me of the original TV's like the 14" CRT TV's, I remember the big magnifying glasses in front of the TV to get a larger picture.

Can I recommend a pair of binoculars

I use my Digital Stream as my main Freeview PVR, keeping my old Toppy for radio. Note that the DS is an old model and iPlayer no longer works on it and its support for the IPTV channels is patchy. But for £80 it is not bad when used as a basic Freeview HD PVR.

I remember the magnifier screens. I also remember how impressed I was when we got a 17" RGD when ITV first started. Maybe that's why I'm happy with my comparatively enormous 22".

I'm with you. I upgraded from a 14" CRT just before the Olympics to a 1080 HD LED 24".

Hardly ever watch TV - but that might or will change when my Chromecast arrives tomorrow.

I watch youtube on my laptop much more than TV

For me anything bigger than 24" or 26" just begins to dominate a room.

I have a couple of what must be around 22" in rooms - although one has just been replaced by a 32" as someone gave us a crappy HD Ready TV that I hope will be better when I get a better box and use the HDMI cable.

I was quite happy with that when the wife wanted the main TV for her Docu's and now i'm struggling to get used to this 32" in a small room.

I have a 50 inch HD Ready plasma TV (1024x768) that I watch from 3 metres and it's absolutely fabulous, providing all the detail I need from that distance. Even the best SD channels look softer or very much softer from there, but full HD would provide no benefit for me (so I saved a couple of hundred quid). On a 22 inch TV like the O/P has, anything more than bog standard SD would be a waste of time and money at 3 metres.

On the other hand, I watch full HD TV from a tuner card in my PC, on a 27 inch 1080p monitor at less than a metre (34 inches to be precise) and I see all the detail that 1080p can provide. SD looks soft and pixellated from there and I often shrink the window below full screen when on SD material.

However, it's apparent when watching full HD close-up like that, that any significant movement including panning or zooming lowers the resolution so full HD only maintains full HD spatial resolution on fairly static scenes anyway and is thus overrated. 720p/50 would have produced a better compromise IMO but hey, the broadcasters always think they know better and all adopted the same damned standard for everything... it would have been nice to have a bit of choice on this to let the general public decide which they preferred!

We have a 22" in the kitchen and can easily read EPG text at 4m, granted it would be difficult to distinguish between SD and HD even at the op's 3m distance so major benefits would be few and far between, but there is HD content that looks better than SD where the difference is more noticeable like football on ITV.

Even if the benefits are not noticeable all the time, at least they would be in the knowledge they are watching the best possible picture available - personally I'd say go for it.

Looking at a Sony HD ready KDL-22EX553 showing the triathlon on BBC1 at the moment. At 3m you can see the difference between HD & SD on the helicopter shots quite clearly, less so on other shots. Difference not that noticeable on C4 racing. 3m is a long way from a 22 inch TV of course, even my analogue modulator doesn't look bad at that range.

And this is were people get confused as a HD Ready set at 1280 x 720 simply cannot display 1080i at 1920 x 1080. There isn't enough pixels.

I think you misunderstood. The point was related to displaying a high definition epg using hdmi such as the Freetime one, on a small screen at such an extreme distance. If the epg is in SD then it will have larger text. Basically a SD EPG is overlaid at 720 x 576 and a HD one at 1920 x 1080 whatever definition the broadcast currently being viewed is. A freetime box when connected by scart, which forces the epg to be downscaled to 720 x 576 and then the TV has to rescale to it's native pixel count. which makes it look very fuzzy.

You will find it very very difficult to find a TV with 1280 x 720 pixels. Only a very few early Plasmas had 720 lines. Virtually all HD TV's with a lower resolution than 1080 lines have 768 lines.

Of course but then that wasn't my point was it. The same still stand for any resolution lower than 1920 x 1080.

And why do you see that as a problem?.

A decent HD Ready set provides a far better picture (in both SD and HD) than a cheap Full HD set does - bigger numbers don't mean better, far from it.

It's also completely distance related as well, to get any benefit at all from Full HD you have to view from considerably closer (probably only one screen size away?) than you do with an HD Ready set - and people generally don't.

Who said I seen it as a problem?

I never said otherwise

Again I never said otherwise

Go back and reread my first post and the quote.

"The original TV's had to be capable of displaying the following broadcast formats with a minimum display format of 720 lines.

720p 1280 x 720 at 50 fps in a progressive format
1080i 1440 x 1080 or 1920 x 1080i at 25fps"

I was pointing out that it gets confusing when a HD Ready set can't actually display 1080i.

You have entirely missed the point.

If a HD Ready TV can't display 1080i you would not see a picture.

You are confusing a broadcast/video transmission with a display resolution. They are not the same.

By the same argument you could say a HD TV cannot display a 576i SD video nor a 1280 x 720 HD picture.

For many years most HD broadcasts were 1440 x 1080 pixels, are you saying a full-HD 1920 x 1080 display could not display the result.

You are confusing the ability to display the source video with the ability to display the source with a 1:1 pixel ratio.

There is no colour monitor/TV that can do this (Including CRT displays), including PC monitors and any other colour video display, from anything other than a source that matches the screen resolution and additionally has a refresh rate that the display is capable of synchronising to.

The point is that the display has a fixed resolution, in every case if the signal does not match the screen it has to be rescaled.

I've missed no point. What I said is factually correct. A HD ready set can't display anything other than it's native resolution. Saying this means you won't see a picture is just wrong. A HD Ready set of 720p 1280 x 720 can only display a resolution of 720p (1280 x 720). This doesn't mean it can't input at other resolutions but the scaler will deal with them and output them at the native resolution.