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| Customer Service | 5.1/10   |
|---|---|
| Features | 5.7/10 |
| Value for Money | 3.7/10 |
| Reviewer Rating | 4.2/10 |
| Overall Rating | 4.5/10 |
Full review by
mpwheatley
on 3rd Oct 2008
User Rating : 0
Respect :
0
Good Points: Some HD programmes look quite nice. Nothing else good about Sky HD.
Bad Points: Two £399 separate boxes became faulty after 18 months, picture quality not that great, limited number of HD channels. Very buggy on board software, multiple resets and planner rebuilds required to get the things functioning, one on board tuner failed, Live Pause rarely works, planned recordings fail about 40% of the time. Now cannot get any BBC channels or ITV.
General comments: I bought two Sky HD boxes at £399 each in September 2006 and within a year one started to fail, with the dreaded 'Failed' or 'Clashed' error message appearing on recordings, even when no other recording was being made. Then one of the two on board tuners failed after about a year and a half, now I can pick up about 25% of the channels I used to be able to (cannot get any BBC channels or ITV) & recordings of those channels are very hit and miss affair. Often the box will tell me that a future recording has failed because of a 'power failure' even though the programme isn't on for days yet! The other box is now showing similar problems & I am left with two very expensive paper weights. The Sky + Planners seem to be very buggy indeed, I owned a TiVo for 5 years prior to this and never, ever had a problem with it. With my two boxes I am having to perform almost daily resets (pulling power cable out & plugging back in again) and performing planner rebuilds just to get the damn things functioning. They crash a lot and live pause rarely works now. Both boxes seem to be rapidly failing and this is outrageous when they are only two years old.
Sky HD picture quality when it is working isn't that great, certainly not as good as Blu-Ray, I think Sky must compress the video quite a lot, colour banding on sunsets and under-water scenes can be wince inducing.
Don't waste your money with Sky HD, you will up up paying hundreds of pounds for a useless piece of junk. Sky should be ashmed of itself on allowing such buggy poor quality equipment to be sold. Oh, and for this privilege you have to pay a £10 monthly HD fee on top of the normal subscription!
Wait until Freesat HD is available, Sky HD at the moment is a complete mess and a not value for money.
mpwheatley's review and ratings | 400 words
Review by
Guest.
on 3rd Jul 2008
User Rating : 0
Respect :
0
I would like to talk to somebody at Sky HD who can sort out the trouble with out having to go through the unplugging every time as it is i have to do this 3 to 4 times a day and am very fed up with it or i'm on the phone to you spending more money and still unplugging and missing the programmes i have had a new tv ariel the ariel man back to check it all to no avail so you still have a lot of work to do or i have a faulty box to which Sky won't admit.
Guest.'s full review | 183 words
Review by
Bertan
on 24th May 2008
User Rating : 1
Respect :
0
It is certainly not worth the price SKY charging, if it was free may be. We have had it for few months and we are not impressed at all. Only few programmes had good HD picture. HD picture is usually very grainy. It is no where near blu ray disks.
Bertan's full review | 137 words
Review by
Ma2T
on 14th Mar 2008
User Rating : 9
Respect :
0
I think sky HD is amazing, its quality is far superior to standard quality. The sharpness, colours and details are all amazing.
Ma2T's full review | 28 words
Review by
Matty2
on 15th Apr 2007
User Rating : 7
Respect :
0
So, I had Sky plus, and I upgraded to Sky HD. Now, first thing first, the HD experience was brilliant. Unfortunately, there aren't many HD channels to watch. Hopefully we'll see lots more in the future.
The actual channels are great to watch in HD. Sky Sports HD 1 & 2 are good, but on football, the fast moving of the camera sometimes makes the screen a bit hypnotic. Sky One HD is good for the channels that are in HD, but cartoons like the Simpsons or Futurama with HD it makes the colours a bi ...
Matty2's full review | 162 words | 1 comment added.
Review by
carternm31
on 28th Mar 2007
User Rating : 8
Respect :
0
I was a bit sceptical of Sky HD at first as its a lot of money for not a lot more channels, but having an other half who needs everything there and then we purchased it. It was great for the fact our sky plus now has a bigger hard drive, however that counteracts with the fact that recording just 1 sky HD movie takes up about half of it.
The HD geographic channels are brilliant! and I almost feel a little more educated now, but watching the Simpson's in HD is absolutely pointless...
As I ha ...
carternm31's full review | 161 words
Review by
stevenswain
on 6th Jan 2007
User Rating : 6
Respect :
+1
I have a Sony KDL-32V2000U TV which gives excellent picture quality from a top of the range digital aerial. I've had Sky since the very beginning but as I now wanted Sky multi-room at home, I took the plunge to go for an HD box at the same time. So having had it for a couple of weeks, I thought I'd review it.
The box itself looks OK cosmetically and didn't take too long to set up. The recommended settings for the HDMI is automatic but the engineer set my box up as default at 1080i. On the rec ...
stevenswain's full review | 467 words
Review by
jobod
on 21st Jun 2006
User Rating : 1
Respect :
+2
Failed recordings, picture break-up and freezing, recording playback freezing (for hours), set-top box cut-out, lack of sound, distorted sound, a far worse product than my original 5 year-old box. Also, no auto-view feature, which could be frustrating, should any of the programmes actually ever be watchable. Add to this little lot to appalling customer service. I was promised a new satellite dish when I ordered the HD as I had experienced picture break-up and freezing with the old box, but nothi ...
jobod's full review | 1400 words | 1 comment added.
Review by
yogib
on 1st Jun 2006
User Rating : 6
Respect :
+1
At this stage, the Sky channels do not appear to be any better than the original broadcast channels. The BBC HD preview channel is looking good at present with a noticeable improvement on picture quality. It is still the early stages, and I hope it will improve, but my TV, which is a Panasonic TH42PX60 has excellent picture quality, so that could be why there is no significant difference.
yogib's full review | 78 words
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