If, like probably 90% of people with HD tvs, you get your HD tv at some point after you already have your HD DVR box, you need to set your box up to transmit the HD signal to your tv. If you don’t, even your HD channels will be in 480.
Hopefully you will all picard this and say I knew that. However the reason I’m posting this is because I’ve been to certain friends and family members houses who’ve had HD tvs for 1-2+ years, and never knew about this. cough dad coughphil They’ve been watching 480 ‘HD’ all this time and never knew. Watching a football game or whatever at their house and I say uhh, your picture sucks for HD, did you set up your box? Response is always ‘huh?’. Depending on your TV you may need to switch the input to a different one and back for the TV to ‘recognize’ the new signal.
So, there you go. I’m sure if you fall in the above category you won’t man up and admit it, but I’m sure there will be more than a few people quietly changing the settings on their box after they read this.
480 is not HD. And I know exactly what you are talking about. I see this all the time and then people will argue with you, “It is HD, you don’t know what you are talking about” or “Looks the same to me” I see it with DirecTV and Time Warner all the time. I usually only see it on DirecTV systems if the customer installed it themselves, but I see it with TW HD both ways, I think they need to uptrain their techs.
Techs? Its usually from them bringing the box home themselves and “setting” it up. A lot come in with their SD boxes and swap for a HD box, but never run the wizard for HD.
I know its not, but people are watching their HD channels with the box only set up to output to 480. Since most programming looks a bit better on the HD channels than standard channels even when set to output to only 480 (for example I’d watch channel 702 over 02 on my previous, non-HD tv because it was better, even though not in HD resolution), people turn to them once they get their new HD tv and unknowingly think “Oh Yes, this HD is much better!” even when they haven’t set up thier box to output 720p/1080i. :picard:
