Animal Planet ... HD?

[Tom Bombadil]

This weekend I tuned in to watch a bit of the the Planet Earth series on Animal Planet. When I first started watching it, my initial thought was "Hey, this is pretty decent SD, perhaps the best SD I've ever seen."

But then I remembered that I had tuned to it because it was listed as HD. I hit "INFO" and sure enough it was listed as being in HD.

For HD, the image was very soft. Not horrible, but lacking in detail and vibrancy. It reminded me of some of the Dish Network channels a couple of years ago when they were down-rezzing to 1280x1080 and choking bandwidth too. Well, maybe a little worse than those channels. I've seen DVDs look better than this.

I've seen Planet Earth on Blu-Ray and the detail & color was outstanding. Watching it on the Animal Planet HD channel was a real disappointment. I didn't expect Blu-Ray quality.

I turned in two other times to catch other episodes in other time slots to compare the image quality. It looked pretty much the same.

 

[Bob Nielsen]

I recall that Planet Earth looked pretty good when it was on Discovery HD Theater a while back.

 

[hdtvtechno]

I recall that Planet Earth looked pretty good when it was on Discovery HD Theater a while back.

Yes

 

[durl]

I thought it looked much softer on Animal Planet, too. It looked far better when it aired on HD Theater.

 

[Stargazer]

With all this compressing and so forth of the signals it makes me wonder if tommorrow's compressed HD was yesterdays' uncompressed SD when it comes to quality of the picture. I imagine the HD feed would still be good but you can only go so far with it before there is not as much of a difference.

 

[ONUOsFan]

For what it's worth, I've not seen much of anything on Animal Planet that I would consider HD. Even when it's marked that way, it's frequently stretched and/or upconverted SD. Shows like Crocodile Hunter, etc, that were filmed as SD are billed as HD in the guide on Animal Planet, but you can tell they're not.

Why Animal Planet would air the SD version of Planet Earth and upconvert it, I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me, based on what I've seen from them in the past...

 

[Tom Bombadil]

It's a pretty disappointing channel as far as HD Image Quality goes.

Let's hope it doesn't set a standard that others follow.