High definition and free TV

August 29th, 2009

I spent the afternoon in a caravan with a load of people from Whitby folk week, it s a tradition that my wife has been brought up with.  For the past 20 years my wife and parents in law have been to a party in their friends caravan on the Saturday after folk week.  The average age of the people in the caravan is quite high and they started talking about some of the fun they have had trying to get the latest technology to work.


My parents in law openly admit that they are behind the times when it comes to technology (I believe their computer is actually powered by a water wheel), and they keep saying they are going to get themselves up to date.  I doubt it will happen unless someone drags them kicking and screaming.


They were talking to one of their friend who had recently got himself Sky Free satellite.  He had the sky box but no viewing card so he only gets the basic range.  What he didn’t know was there is a difference between freesat and freeview.  There is a wider range of channels on Freeview and to get all the channels on freesat you need to get a special viewing card from sky for a one off fee of £20.


Apparently he spend ages trying to tune his freesat box to get UKTV Dave channel (easily the best one there) but couldn’t.  Unfortunately he had been using the freeview website for the channel list he should be receiving not the freesat one.


After that the conversation turned to high definition.  The HDTV in my house is connected my Xbox to as our big TV produced a really poor picture for it.  I am not too bothered about getting my channels that are HD as I find for normal TV the pictures are just fine.  My sister loves her technology and  has huge HDTV and I must admit that for programmes like life and Earth it does look amazing.  The one thing the confuses me is the difference between 1080i and 1080p, I have heard that people don’t think 1080i is really full HD, so I looked it up using technology forums and found out that I don’t really care, 1080i is good enough for me.

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