Has anyone else spotted the joke of a product that Asda are now selling in their stores.
It's an HD compatible freeview box, or so it says on the box. It aslo says that its "1080dpi". The box has an HDMI connection but that surley does not mean they can call it HD compatible. It's being sold for about £30-40 from memory.
A lot of people will buy this thinking they will get HD tv through the box.
Anyone else seen this or have any thoughts?
Last edited by skinj : 08-11-2007 at 14:39

'HD compatible' isn't a term with any specific meaning, unlike 'HDTV' and 'HD Ready' which is presumably why they're using it...

I doubt that, at that price, it has MPEG4/AVC decoding.

NO it doesn't. That's my point. Very misleading. The info on the box even states 1080dpi. They can't even use the right terminology in the wrong way!

Like all the upscaling DVD players, it's just a con, making customers believe they are getting HD.

And it will work, seeing as there's so many people out there who think stretched 4:3 is widescreen. Upscaled HD won't be unusual to them.

Tesco have a similarly misleading Technika DVD Player. It too has HDMI, but it only upscales DVDs, and even then only via the HDMI socket (it also has YPrPv) it won't read HD-DVDs - it too claims to be HD Compatible.

I work in Currys and one customer bought a "HDMI DVD Player" and then brought it back because it would not play their HD DVDs. Ha Ha Ha!

I tried to sell them a HD DVD Player to solve their problems but they were not having it.

The whole point of upscailing DTT recivers is a good idea , it provides a stop gap until there is a proper HD service on freeview , the box uses a upscaler chip to up convert to 1080 lines , there is also dvd players which upscale conventional DVD's

As explained anyone that can make use of internal scaling and de-interlacing by a Freeview box or DVD player already has the same function provided by their TV.
Yes a lot of TV's will use lower end scaling chipsets but then again hands up who thinks a £50 DVD player or Freeview box has the processing power of a dedicated £2000 scaler or £400+ real HD player with which to obviously outperform the TV?

There are certainly benefits in having a digital link but they are not being marketed as such.