4. Where Will You Find The Best HD?

It is kind of a toss-up as to who offers the most technologically superior high definition content. Just based on my own experience, I’ve found HDNet’s picture to always be the best among all the major HD channels. Also, with an enormous demand for high definition sports content, ESPN HD usually delivers beyond what any sports fan could want. The network channels are all roughly the same, often with hit-or-miss results. NBC’s Today, for example, often has trouble with formatting and reformatting the picture during breaks to local weather, which sometimes results in the HD feed being scaled down to standard definition for a few minutes. It’s this struggle to accommodate both HDTV and SDTV sets that makes network programming the most aggravating for videophiles.

NBC’s morning show has been in high definition since last year, but is still plagued with technical problems.

Of the HD-exclusive channels, I’ve always been the most disappointed with Universal HD. Its lineup is almost exclusively vintage content that just can’t compete with the technology used in today’s programming. Premium HD movie channels (HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc) are without a doubt the best options for over-the-air movies, but my gripe is that there isn’t more original content from these channels that is available in high definition. Starz is the leader with, hands down, the most extensive HD-on-demand library.

Conclusion

The sea of HDTV programming may be fairly small right now, but there are many different layers to it. It’s a great source for original content, with an extremely rapidly expanding library. The effect of such a wide open platform is that there is little uniformity to the content, and most of the time the only way to know what a show will look like is to just watch it. Newcomers to HD should understand that TV programming is definitely not the best representation of what your high definition set can deliver, and most likely you’ll notice a difference in picture quality just from swapping back and forth between HD channels. The bottom line is that, no matter how many layers you may have thought already applied to HDTV, there are still many more.

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