When I put the TV on in my office last night for the England match I absent-mindedly went to freeview accidentally rather than Sky and put on ITV. 5 minutes into the game must have been when I first looked up at it and realised it wasn’t in HD. It looked ******* awful! I found myself questioning myself. Was it always that bad? Have we just got accustomed to HD now so SD looks so much worse? Is it due to the way LED TVs work as opposed to the CRTs? Or just due to TVs being bigger these days? I’m not exaggerating when I say that to me it was pretty much unwatchable.
it’s very much the way the images are scaled on the larger screens. I was thinking exactly the same as you, i’ve never watched a game in years gone by thinking the images were rubbish.
I can't remember black and white TVs, but I've spent more time watching analogue TV than HD TV in my life! Never noticed it before, but when I looked up at the game yesterday in SD I was shocked how bad it looked.
Waiting for it to warm up & watching the dot disappear when you turned it off after the national anthem.
If you think back to the 80s and early 90s a 28” tv was the pinnacle of technology! I worked at currys around that time and our centrepiece of the TVs was a 28” Toshiba Nicam (remember that?). We used to demo it with the opening scenes from topgun. Looked and sounded amazing at the time and a snip at £1099! I bet it’s rubbish compared to what you can buy now for £200! As said above the smaller screens of yesteryear made the picture look sharper, upscale it and its limitations are obvious.
Vague memories of the 1982 World Cup watched on a black and white portable with a coat hanger for an aerial and commentary that sounded like a phone call with weak signal.
During the late 90s, early 2000s I worked at Dixons and was amazed at the vast leaps in technology. SD on a 15-28" screen was fine, but you can't watch SD on a modern 55" screen. I remember we had a 42" Hitachi Plasma TV in the back of the shop in 2002 and we all come in to work early to watch the World Cup matches in Japan/Korea. It was amazing at the time but cost £12,999.... for a bloody TV! And we sold some.
It's the size of the screen you were watching it on. SD scaled up on a large HDTV really doesn't look good. But on the size of TV we all used to have at a distance from the sofa we used to have it still looks OK
We used to have three "shadows" of Barrow pit muck stack on ours, I could watch the buckets tipping at the end of the stack
Ratchet effect innit. There's no going back. Except for Look North. Why is regional news still SD when most mobile phones record in 4k
Came down to a choice between updating broadcast equipment in the BBC regional studios or keeping laura kuenssberg topped up with foie gras and the powers that be opted for the latter.
I've been noticing this recently too, I think because our tv is bigger now. It's the same definition over a larger area so I'm guessing that's why it looks bad
Yeah this is probably by far the main factor isn't it. It just absolutely shocked me when I accidentally put it on last night. Looked nothing like what I remember games looking like when I was younger. I remember when HD first came out and a lot of people said they couldn't tell the difference. I wasn't quite at that level but I used to think it wasn't a huge difference. I guess TVs have just advanced more than I realised. With it being incremental upgrades it's probably just happened over time hasn't it and caught me off guard.