Received an email from Sky today regarding a pre-order option for HD

£299 for the box plus £10 a month extra subscription

Early May given as the expected date for installation.

Have you tried filling in the pre-pay form yet?
They have been inundated with calls this morning.
I hope the HD broadcasts are better than this!

Yes I registered this morning and paid ye olde deposit without difficulty

comet are taking £30 deposits and your phone nos and sky contact you to arrange install in may
first come first served was salesmans comment

neil

I signed up and paid my £30 deposit, can't wait!
John

apparently sky will start the phone call process on 6th april

neil

Whats the deal on connections etc? Apparently although many TVs claim HD compatibility there is only one Panasonic model in the UK that actually is HD?

gary check this link out
http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=240938

hope it helps

neil

Hi Nei. No thats not much help.

Word is the connections, i.e. the wires you need to connect SKY HD to a TV will be specific and most i.e. 99% of TVs do not have this connection.

Sorry I can't be more specific.

Put another way my Acer LCD says its HD ready on the box, but apparently is not compatible with the up and coming sky boxes.

Not that I care that much I only watch the Simpsons.

The connection would be HDMI. Have a look at Sky HD.
John

My Telewest TV Drive HD capable box will output HD over HDMI and component. Surely most HD ready TV's have component connections?

Do not rely too much on the TV manufacturers list, it is clearly incomplete or, for example, Loewe are trading under false pretences. I have a Xelos LCD TV which is "HD" ready according to Loewe. It has an HDMI input socket on the back as well as scart and component. I would have expected the Sky HD box to output to an HDMI socket on the TV. Perhaps someone, who knows, will correct me if I am mistaken??

I have no idea what an HDMI socket is, my Acer does not have one so technically its not HD ready haha.

But more than that some TVs will not be capable of showing the resolution that makes it HD.

I was speaking to someone in the industry so cannot point you at a website.

Sorry.

720p is enough for HD I believe. Sure 1080i or 1080p or whatever is supposed to be better but you need a display that will accomodate it.

I have a projector that runs natively at 720p. When I switch to 1080i (through the TV Drive) the picture is clearly not as good. The projector needs to take the 1080i signal and scale it to 720p, it's natural resolution. So my point is that sometimes, as with everything, bigger numbers are not necessarily better.

You can get HD off a component cable. I believe the problem is (and someone please correct me if this is wrong) but component will not allow copy protection. Hence the preference for using HDMI.

Garyi - HDMI is just DVI in another form factor, oh, and it allows for the transfer of audio as well. DVI is only video.

Jay

Thanks Jay, in the event do you see it possible to get and adaptor for DVI and use other audio ports?

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
Thanks Jay, in the event do you see it possible to get and adaptor for DVI and use other audio ports?

Do you mean a HDMI to DVI adapter or HDMI to DVi cable? Yes you can get those, no problem. I think you need a compliant DVI port though. If your tele has a DVI port take a look in the manual and see whether it mentions it's copy protection compliant or such like. The extact term escapes me at the moment!

Any decent decoder box will output audio via coax/opt or RCA's. That's how we use our projector the HDMI straight to the projector and optical audio out to the AV2.

Jay