Originally Posted by rsnissan
its down to the box, the best virgin media box upscales thats why yours was improved Yodi.
The lead wont make a difference.
Scart connections don't upscale - they pass a maximum of 576i (minimum "HD" is 720p (progressive) and 1080i (interlaced) and max "HD" is 1080p)
Originally Posted by tonyk
Coswurv, there is nothing you can do but bite the bullet and buy a sky hd box. The reason the picture looks bad on your 50" TV is; the normal sky box only outputs a small number of pixels (blocks). Lets say 100,000 pixels makes up the image, this looks ok on a 20" TV as the 100,000 pixels fill this ok.
When the TV is a 50" these 100,000 pixels are increased in size to fill the screen. This is why you see blocks at times on your screen, probablky more on fast moving images. Sky HD uses more pixels and the picture looks sharper on larger sets such as your 50".
***This is a basic explanation of how this works and is obviously more complicated****
edited to add, Comet are doing a SKY HD deal for £99.
Well said that man - nice easy to understand explanation
I'll try to make it a bit more confusing
Standard def video in this country is all 576i. 576 relates to the amount of horizontal lines of picture, and the i relates to the scar type : i being interlaced (with p being progressive) Interlaced pictures show lines 1+3+5+6+7+8+9 etc, followed by lines 2+4+6+8+10 etc alternating, whereas progressive shows all lines, err, progressively
ie in correct series and order - producing a more natural image, less flickery and has the ability to house more data, hence more lines.
HD is 720p minimum, 1080p maximum. So if your TV is a 1080p set, you have one-thousand-and-eighty horizontal lines of picture on your screen
If the screen is fed a 576 line source (such as Sky, Freeview, analogue TV, normal DVD etc) the TV has to enlarge the image so it fills the 1080 lines it has from the native 576 lines. Otherwise you would just have a small picture in the middle of the TV surrounded by blackness.
So it blows it up, and everytime you enlarge something, you lose quality. Moreover, blockyness is accentuated by bit rate (the quality of the source in binary form) - the lower it is, the worse it will be and the more artifacts will be visible. Hence why I bet standard def DVD films look better on your TV than Sky.
The reason the PS3 looks insane is becaue it outputs in HD (games in 720p, BluRay films in (mostly) 1080p) so using all the lines (720p=1080i so still uses all lines in a 1080p set) so naturally looks tonnes better
Sufficiently confused?