What's HD I remember 2 channels in black and white with intermittent snow, so I'm delighted with what I have.

I remember one channel for a short time each day, complete with snow from the Queen's coronation onward.
My OH has HD and it's nothing special. HD and large screens will never be any compensation for the huge amount of dire TV and which I rarely bother watching.
There's far better stuff available on-line and too many books to read.

What a pillock. Unlike coffee which needs water slightly off the boil to avoid excessive bitterness, tea needs boiling hot water to bring out the full flavour. If you put the milk in first it'll be lukewarm and you'll get shite tea. No amount of denatured protein is going to fix that.

Tea made with loose leaf and brewed properly in a pot to suitable strength is fine to add to milk in the cup.

If the channel is not in HD yet, It is fine to watch it through you may find the older TV shows on YouTube.

I am quite happy with mine.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/...68_634x459.jpg

My kids would probably say the same about me as I regularly record stuff in SD when I could record in HD. Flying the banner for your mum I would have to say that although I can see the difference when I am shown the same program in both formats it does not diminish my enjoyment of a program one iota if I watch it in SD. As far as being a moron, I do a high pressure management job in a career that has a graduate entry level
so I know I am smart, as I suspect your mum is too. We are just not smart in this area of our lives but hey, you can't be good at everything 😊.

I had to stop watching Eastenders in HD because it just didnt feel gritty and real anymore.

Your brain ignores the quality after a few minutes anyway. Don't forget we used to love VHS Tapes, even when they were old and knackered or a 10th generation bootleg.


PVRs can store a lot more SD recordings than HD. Saves on disc space.

It's even better without the milk .

We used VHS because we had no alternative, not because we loved it (laserdisc never entered the mainstream). Bulky, limited content, and fuzzy shaky pause screen. No thanks.

Some eye conditions make the difference neglible that's why we never bothered to buy one, optician says it would be a waste of money for my husband.

I had the misfortune to have to watch one of those on Christmas Day and the picture quality was terrible. What made matters worse was that my sister couldn't see anything wrong with the yellow-tinted, bleached-out, low contrast picture and got annoyed when I went into the menu to try to improve it. That couldn't happen anyway, because the only options anywhere in the menu to tweak the colour are four or five presets.

Anyway ... I've hidden all the SD channels for which there are HD equivalents, apart from the BBC local station, which I have moved next to the HD channel to enable a quick and easy switch-over for the news. There are plenty of HD channels on Freeview, although I'm finding I spend ever more time watching TalkingPictures TV, which is sometimes quite low-res. Sky West and Crooked was on the other night – better than any other film shown on TV over the entire Christmas period.

Perhaps, like me, she couldn't give a shit?

I have always found it strange how others are so involved in what other people like and do as if it affects them.

Concentrate on your own life.

Agreed. I bought a Samsung "Smart" TV about two years ago. Never been happy with it. The backlight washes everything out and it has an autocontrast mode which is infuriating and can't be turned off.

Living near the exchange provides a better picture in SD than living a long way from it from it. Perhaps that explains why some people feel no need to watch in HD.

Unless you keep falling off the digital cliff it doesn't

Thank you Robin; I hadn't heard of that effect before, but the quotation below seems to bear out what I said:-

"Secondly, if one is located in a fringe area, where the antenna is just barely strong enough to receive the signal, then usual variation in signal quality will cause relatively frequent signal degradation, and a very small change in overall signal quality can have a dramatic impact on the frequency of signal degradation"

I'm an ex video and telecomms engineer and I live in a dip.

I need two boosters in series for my Freeview reception. And it still pixellates and cuts out more than I would like (a few times per day for a few seconds)

Maybe moron is too strong a word, but there's a lot of people like this who seem unaware that they could be watching BBC ONE HD, ITV HD or Channel 4 HD instead, often on a 1080 TV with the SD picture looking awful and washed out, it doesn't help that on Sky the channels are not mapped to 101, 103 & 104. Hopefully Channel 4 HD will be moving to 104 soon with the launch of the advertising regions, ITV remains more complex.

Similar to the widescreen era coming in and people buying the new TV's and then watching everything 4:3 stretched, that was a "thing" of the Noughties!

Ah then you are better equipped than most to get the best reception possible; it must be very frustrating for you. We moved here before broadband etc. etc. were available for the multitude. Just good luck for us.

I'm amazed that there are people who say they can't tell the difference between SD and HD (or HD and 4K), but there might be a reason. I remember when the i-Can Easy HD box first came out I took it round to my dad's house to show him what it was like and to see if he wanted one. I had to admit that I struggled to tell the difference. Then more recently I took my Humax recorder round with its HD tuner. Then I noticed that his TV needed to have the output manually switched via the menu to 1080i (or p if you prefer). The difference was then completely obvious.

My TV output is 1080, so why is there no difference between SD and HD quality?

Can't comment on the other platforms, but as a freeview user, I got so fed up with regional lockouts and the 'sorry we can't screen the current program in HD' (or whatever it says) on BBC1 HD that I stick with SD all the way now.

Say for example I'm watching the 6 o'clock news in HD and want to carry through to the local regional news too at half past. No chance on BBC1 HD, so I just don't bother with it any more.

And besides, I have a top-flight HTPC under my telly and with the power of a full PC and GPU behind it, it does the most amazing job at upscaling SD. The output quality exceeds anything I've seen from freeview set top boxes, or the tuner built into the telly. Sure it's far from HD, but it's not a pixellated mess of lego bricks either.

I record a shirt load of stuff too, especially anything with adverts. I can't justify swallowing up 4x+ the amount of disk space to record in HD over SD either.

I do buy films on blu-ray and appreciate HD for that. But for run of the mill TV viewing I don't find HD important at all.

I think broadcast HD is overrated too. It's compressed to buggery and don't believe it is anything close to representing HD at its very best.