What shows off an HD TV image really well?

[Mushtang]

I've just joined the HD crowd and for the first time have HD cable for my flat screen TVs. For years we've had a few 40-ish inch flat screens but have only had regular cable service, we weren't paying for the HD feed. With the recent addition of a Roku we were able to stream some HD movies and liked the difference a lot.

My wonderful wife found a good deal on a Panasonic 60" flat screen and surprised me with an early Xmas present!!! So I talked her into adding the HD channels (only an extra $10 a month) and we've both totally loved it. The higher resolution on the picture is just amazing.

So I thought I'd ask folks here, what is a really good movie/show/etc. to watch in HD that will really show off the difference, or show off how awesome the image really is? Surely there's some good stuff that will just explode off the screen out there - that's what I want to see.

I have access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, but that's all. We don't have Hulu or any of the other streaming apps yet. Maybe someday. And no Blu-Ray player either.

And for those of you that don't watch TV, haven't had cable, and want to let the rest of us know how much better you are than those of us that do watch TV, I'll do ahead and admit it now that you're far superior. Now you don't even have to post.

 

[tim cubbedge]

I can't speak of any shows or movies but I have seen big difference in golf and football.

 

[stealth6]

And for those of you that don't watch TV, haven't had cable, and want to let the rest of us know how much better you are than those of us that do watch TV, I'll do ahead and admit it now that you're far superior. Now you don't even have to post.

the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

s6

 

[KennB]

My sister gifted me with a nice 42" HD some years back. I had standard cable so didn't get too much benefit there. DVDs were a little better but I didn't have Blu-Ray for the best picture.
When I got my Roku LT, I got Netflix. The first film I watched was Microcosmos. It was spectacular. I've added Hulu Plus recently and am amazed at how old Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert really look.

 

[troj]

Get an HD OTA antenna and watch TV with that. Seriously. The picture will be way better than your "HD" channels from cable. I had read this was the case, and recently experienced it myself. We're experiencing that bigtime, since we ditched cable a little over a week ago.

If you don't want to go that route, get a BluRay player and drop in a BluRay disk.

Your cable signal isn't going to really show off what your TV is capable of. Your HD channels (especially with sports such as football and basketball) will be better than anything you've ever seen, but I'd call it somewhere between 480i and 720p in terms of resolution. We get 1080i with our HD antenna, and BluRay will do 1080p.

-Kevin

 

[Mushtang]

the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

s6

Nah. I just have a good feeling that those kinds of posts would follow. I also know it's not possible to completely avoid them, but I thought I'd do what I could.

 

[H_Rocket]

If you can find a show called Animusic on some HD streaming source it does showcase HD quite well.

 

[CarVac]

Get an HD OTA antenna and watch TV with that. Seriously. The picture will be way better than your "HD" channels from cable. I had read this was the case, and recently experienced it myself. We're experiencing that bigtime, since we ditched cable a little over a week ago.

If you don't want to go that route, get a BluRay player and drop in a BluRay disk.

Your cable signal isn't going to really show off what your TV is capable of. Your HD channels (especially with sports such as football and basketball) will be better than anything you've ever seen, but I'd call it somewhere between 480i and 720p in terms of resolution. We get 1080i with our HD antenna, and BluRay will do 1080p.

-Kevin

Antennas are great. They compress the video Much, Much, Much less than cable; cable is blocky and banded and smeary.

1080i content is actually most likely just transmitted that way; it's almost certainly originally 30fps instead of 60. So your TV decodes it and deinterlaces it resulting in actually higher resolution, but with a slower framerate. Note that this is completely independent of the video compression bitrate.

 

[Mushtang]

Get an HD OTA antenna and watch TV with that. Seriously. The picture will be way better than your "HD" channels from cable. I had read this was the case, and recently experienced it myself. We're experiencing that bigtime, since we ditched cable a little over a week ago.

I'd never have expected antenna to have a superior image than HD cable. That's amazing!

If you don't want to go that route, get a BluRay player and drop in a BluRay disk.

There definitely has to be one of those in my future.

Your cable signal isn't going to really show off what your TV is capable of. Your HD channels (especially with sports such as football and basketball) will be better than anything you've ever seen, but I'd call it somewhere between 480i and 720p in terms of resolution. We get 1080i with our HD antenna, and BluRay will do 1080p.

This is the biggest surprise of all. I'm sure the cable company doesn't really promote their resolution as being only 720. If that's what I'm looking at it still looks great, and now I'm wondering just how good 1080 will look?

Thanks Troj!

 

[HHaase]

Nightmare before Christmas on blue-Ray.

It may be over 20 years old but man does it look great in HD

 

[jcato]

So I thought I'd ask folks here, what is a really good movie/show/etc. to watch in HD that will really show off the difference, or show off how awesome the image really is? Surely there's some good stuff that will just explode off the screen out there - that's what I want to see.

Go ahead and find a moderately decent Blu-Ray player and then get 1) Ken Burns PBS 'The National Parks' mini-series and 2) the new COSMOS series (with Neil deGrasse Tyson) (both in Blu-Ray, obviously). The first 10 minutes of the first disk of 'The National Parks' will convince you HD was worth it, all by itself. COSMOS will do the same, pretty much.

I'm not spending too much time replacing any prior DVDs with Blu-Ray (mainly because most of those movies were not mastered in HD (altho they talk about 're-mastering' in HD)) due to it's just too much money and hassle - not to mention the conventional DVD's seem to look pretty decent all by themselves (and some of the moderately newer home theatre receivers do some kind of 'upscale' - which could be my situation (Onkyo 6xx series)). I have purchased the newer release of 'Blade Runner' in Blu-Ray - and am fixing to do the same with 'The Right Stuff' (BR), as I've seen some rather glowing reviews on how much nicer TRS is in BR.

Like I said, make your first BR purchase 'The National Parks' - I can't feel you'd regret it in the least.

-- john.

 

[Sooner Boomer]

I'll second going with Blu Ray and OTA. I bought a 3D TV (the price was right and the specs are phenomenal), but there's not a lot of 3D content. You can build your own, fairly good, OTA antenna - google Gray-Hoverman antenna. I built one on foamboard using "stained glass" foil tape..

 

[swatkat]

I've got 4k footage of our last rocket launch.

 

[blackjack2564]

I also ditched cable 6 months ago and went with a 20.00 antenna. About the size of a file folder and just as thin.
The HD channels I get are phenomenal.

It's nice not paying 936.00 a year for TV. [12 x 78.00] heck most of the cable channels are crap anyhow & what I don't get, that I must watch I use Hulu or go to the channel direct on my computer.

 

[troj]

I'd never have expected antenna to have a superior image than HD cable. That's amazing!

There definitely has to be one of those in my future.

This is the biggest surprise of all. I'm sure the cable company doesn't really promote their resolution as being only 720. If that's what I'm looking at it still looks great, and now I'm wondering just how good 1080 will look?

I had read about it, and thought "Uh huh, sure...." and then I saw it. Trust me, it wasn't what we expected, either!

But the more I read on it, the more it made sense -- the cable companies are trying to get 100+ channels through their network, all at the same time, so they have to compress it to do so. Don't get me wrong -- that HD signal from the cable company is way better than standard cable. But it's nowhere near what your TV can do!

-Kevin

 

[MikeyDSlagle]

When looking at HD tvs its also important to look at refresh rates. 60, 120, or 240 Hz. With 60 being the worst. The higher the rate, the less "ghosting" you will notice.

With that being said, man you are missing out on excellent TV if you don't have BluRay. I dont have the capabilites to stream movies so I dont know how "HD" streamed movies really are but I have seen several on dvd and BluRay. Some I would recommend:
Avatar
300 (the original but Rise of an Empire looks just as good)
Transformers (again the first one so your not overwhelmed by Bayhem)
The Fellowship of the Ring ( haven't seen it on BluRay, watch it and compare then let me know ;-)

Playing a game on full HD (1080p) is like watching the action outside your window, its pretty amazing. Mix in surround sound or high quality noise cancelling headphones and it is truly incredible.

Mike

 

[etoyoc]

Signal depends on where you live. I just switched to HDTV as well due to an HDMI requirement on a Christmas present for someone... Anyway, I discovered that our OTA reception is not good here. I have to mess with the antenna each time I want a different station. Now, according to the FCC reception map: https://transition.fcc.gov/mb/engineering/dtvmaps/ I should be able to get several more channels if I had an HD antenna 30 feet up in the air. Unfortunately, I don't and living in an apartment, it isn't an option. With an indoor antenna, I get maybe 5 channels at a time without having to adjust the antenna. The HD channels I was getting looked just like regular def with letter boxing around the picture.

On the other hand, my TV is showing that many of my HD cable channels through Xfinity are 1080i.

I wasn't impressed with the HDTV at all until I finally got the HD box from the cable company - that made a HUGE difference!

 

[RocketDestroyer]

This is the biggest surprise of all. I'm sure the cable company doesn't really promote their resolution as being only 720. If that's what I'm looking at it still looks great, and now I'm wondering just how good 1080 will look?

For OTA digital broadcasts there are something like 20 standards but all of the networks have settled on either 720p or 1080i with 60Hz refresh. As a general rule most people can't tell the different between the two. None of the stations in my area transmit a true high definition picture. They all have two or three standard definition signals multiplexed in with the main high def signal. All of these are using bandwidth taken from the high def signal since each station has a limited bandwidth available. Additionally, some stations seem to be better at adding in the extra channels. The local CBS station has many compression artifacts in their picture. On the other hand football on Fox looks really good.

 

[JDcluster]

They bang you extra for the HD channels?
Here; all you have to do is swap out your old Cable box....
not extra fees.

Some of the channels here are doubled up due to HD
The picture quality is the same on both though...

JD

 

[Sooner Boomer]

My wonderful wife found a good deal on a Panasonic 60" flat screen and surprised me with an early Xmas present!!!

You realize that now you're going to have to upgrade your sound system. Then better/more speakers. Before you know it, you'll be adding a new wing, just for the new home theater.

 

[Marc_G]

You've gotten good advice here, so I have just a few things to add:

On a 60" flatscreen, the differences between 720p, 1080i, and 1080p are readily apparent. You don't have to be particularly a videophile to see the increase in clarity with each step. Standard definition content (ie DVD output at 480i or sometimes 480p) looks like absolute crap. So, the source of the content matters a lot. You should definitely invest in a bluray player, even a cheap one, because it is the only way to get the best out of your set, at the moment. Netflix and Amazon and the like streaming is heavily compressed, even when it is "HD" it looks much worse than the actual BR content. Vudu is better. Pop in something well-mastered like Star Trek Into Darkness BluRay and be blown away (I have problems with lack of adherence to ST canon in the JJ Abrams films, but ST ID is visually beautiful). A decent BluRay player can also upsample DVDs to make them look a bit better.

Alternatively, you could get a home theater PC, like me, and rip your content to it, playing it from there. I cut the cable tv cord back in 2009 and haven't looked back since. I pull the content out of DVD/Bluray and have it all set up with MediaBrowser3 And I have an four OTA tuners available for content from PBS and the main networks that broadcast. But that's a long discussion...

Enjoy your new TV. I second the comment about sound system.... even for someone tone deaf like me, at least a 5.1 sound system becomes a requirement...

Marc

 

[bill_s]

720P is higher resolution than 1080i, or at least requires more data. 1080i, 30 Hz is in most respects 540p, 60 Hz (the resolution of most CRT projection HDTVs). As a result, in the limited bandwidth of a cable or TV channel, 1080i usually looks better and faster, because the extra frames of 60 Hz overwhelms the compression even further.

The ATSC standard calls for cable to use 3 times the bandwidth than over the air, but I don't think they're using it. Any kind of compressed format conversion degrades quality.

The best demo of HD is letterboxed HD on a SD channel through a wide screen TV. What a messed up combination... I saw a game show in HD today that looked fantastic. Anything that was never analog (or film) looks great -- digital data compression hates analog, uses all its bandwidth on noise. Also avoid anything with a lot of motion such as sports as this eats bandwidth too.