The banter in the office had been rife for the past three months, who was going to get their Sky HD box first? With the answer coming in early April after a call form the HD Customer Support Team I was please to be at the top of the pile and the envy of many with a scheduled install on the first day of rollout, Monday 22^nd May.

Ever since taking delivery of my LG 37” LCD panel mid last year I’d been dieing to get a decent quality TV signal so that I could come full circle and have an image as good as on my old CRT!  Sky HD seemed to be the perfect answer and with the Guinness Premiership (Rugby) being advertised as one of the sports being broadcast in HD the £299 one off and additional £10 per month was a no brainer.

Having persuaded the wife she needed to wait in all day for Sky to come and undertake some “routine repairs” on our set-top box, I was extremely frustrated that the HD team called my home to cancel the installation and at the same time inadvertently letting the cat out the bag to my wife.  The Thompson box shortage has been well covered in the press and my installation was moved to the Thursday when they finally got some more units in.

I had read a copy of Sky’s training presentation to their installation subcontractors and as a result I’d supplied by own DVI to HDMI cable as the presentation had confirmed that Sky only supply a HDMI to HDMI cable, although this information was never given to me by the HD Customer Services team.  With the cable already connected and left waiting for the engineer I’m reliably informed that he was in and out of the house within 15 minutes with most of his time spent on the phone authorising the viewing card.  The engineer had left the unit configured to 1080i on the basis that when 720p is selected a horizontal interference line of about 5mm appears across the screen.  The engineer has stated to my wife that the fault was my LCD and not the receiver before leaving with the matter unresolved!  This is still unresolved despite escalation to Sky.

On my return home I got my first real life view of the new HD box and as a piece of technology it looks great, although when you handle the unit its clear that its been manufactured to a price.  The unit is slightly wider and taller than the Sky+ unit with cooling occurring from both sides which needs to be taken into consideration when installing the unit into a cabinet, I now have some woodwork to complete!  The receiver seems to be quieter but that could be more to do with my aged Sky+ box than an enhancement.

The Sky HD unit has a reasonable choice of connections, although it only really has one option for true HD connectivity and that’s HDMI.  You can connect HD using the component interface but this is not true HD as it’s not digital and does not use HDCP (encryption).  Standard RF IN and RF Out (x2) are present along with RJ11 for telephone connectivity, RS232, S-video, audio (left and right RCA), optical audio and SCART (x2).  More interestingly the unit has an Ethernet, SATA and USB connections - none of which seem usable yet but leave the mind wondering for further developments.

As standard the unit is installed with a 160Gb hard disk and in my opinion this seems a little lacking given the slight difference in cost for a 250Gb drive, that said given the lack of content 160Gb will probably be an adequate archive for the immediate future. The remote control is a slimmer more elegant version of the Sky+ remote with the usual well thought through usability, as a point of not the old Sky+ remote is fully compatible.

Before we get to the picture quality its worth mentioning that the EPG is slightly different from the standard Sky+ with the ‘red button’ giving a short cut to HD channels from the main TV guide.  This feature is important as it’s otherwise a nightmare to find any HD channels as they are littered thought the EPG in no apparent order other than for Sport and Movies where they appear next to the standard channels e.g. Sky One is channel 106 and Sky One HD is 197.

The easiest way to explain the improvement in picture quality is that my wife not only noticed it but provides a demonstration to guests!  She had not previously noticed the transition to a DVD player with component video and only pickup on the fact we had a new DVD player because my four year old son told her… The picture improvement is massive and even the most die hard CRT fans will have to admit that the image now looks good on an LCD screen.  Colour is vivid and the quality is kept even with the fast moving action of an England Rugby International. Whilst I can’t use the 720p setting, supposedly better for sport 1080i seems to do the trick and I’ve been told by Sky that they are only broadcasting in 1080i anyway.

There are however a couple of ‘watch outs’ – firstly content is king!  I no longer want to watch none HD channels but have little or no choice on the basis that the programming on HD is currently extremely limited.  I was hugely disappointed to find that the Guinness Premiership Rugby Final was not broadcast in HD after being advertised as one of their corner stone channels and in reality there is little else to watch, believe me there is only so many times you can watch a crocodile eating a buffalo.  Yes 24 is fantastic in HD but only 45 minutes per week, I guess the cold reality is that there is not that much quality programming broadcast full stop so taking a small percentage of that as HD is not good.  Still it can only get better over time as more and more content is originated in HD.

The other big watch out is that they pair your existing viewing card to the HD box which has the knock on effect of trashing all the content you have recorded on your Sky+ box.  At no time during my discussion with the HD customer care team or with the engineer was this mentioned to me, if it had I would have watched the episodes of 24 and LOST I had recorded and not seen.  To add salt into my wounds it appears that the timing of my installation has meant that neither LOST or 24 are being repeated…

So in summary; it’s a good looking box with all the interfaces you need now and some more for the future.  Picture quality is a dramatic improvement giving an image that looks as good as the flat screen does.  Sky has made some good tweaks to their excellent EPG allowing HD channel to be easily found, however, the telling fact is that there are only 10 HD channels available and one of them is a preview.  Doubtless that the number of channels will increase the only real question is when should you upgrade and the answer I suspect is now if you have an HD ready LCD screen – if not there is no rush other than to keep up with the Joneses.

Published - 30/05/2006

More Set-Top Box Reviews-

[ Up ] [ Hauppauge USB Digital Terrestrial Receiver DEC2000T ] [ Sony Freeview VTX-D800U ] [ Goodmans GDB5 Freeview ] [ Aevoe Mobix ] [ Hauppauge Digital Terrestrial Receiver DEC1000-t ] [ Alienware DHS2 Media Centre ] [ MSI Portable Freeview Box ] [ Sky HD Review ] [ Pinnacle PCTV USB Stick ] [ Oggle Freeview ]