November 17, 2009

Life on BBC HD

Last night's episode of Life on BBC HD looked pretty good to my eyes. It was about insects, and anyone who watched the series Swarm last year will know that swarms of insects really show the limitations of standard definition with awful blocking and almost unwatchable images. Flicking between BBC1 and HD last night the difference was considerable, especially the sequence showing the migration of the Monarch butterflies. Beautiful.
Reading through the comments on Danielle Nagler's recent blog post it appears that everyone's favourite HD techie Andy Quested is back and investigating the matter. Not before time, as the poll on this blog showed that 83% of respondents felt the picture on BBC HD had deteriorated of late, which is pretty damning in the face of the denials from Auntie.

4 comments:

Admin said...

Top Gear was brilliant in HD, the picture quality was great. I think the problem comes when they do HD stuff as a live broadcast, there's noise which looks bad. The prerecorded stuff looks really good, especially Life and Top Gear.

paul.g.eaton said...

Why have you closed the vote? I've just referred people on the BBC Blogs over to it and it would be good to get a really big sample of views.

Nialli said...

The poll was set to run for a week and only had a handful of votes in the last few days. Given the voting was pretty conclusive I don't think it's worth running again here. It may be worth considering a petition to the BBC - I ran one a year ago demanding more HD on Virgin Media. I'm not convinced it made a great deal of difference to VM's thinking but with the BBC they may respond more. I used http://www.ipetitions.com

BikeNutt said...

I watched (most of) this episode of Life last night. Amazing photography!
and the HD was pretty good too.

The BBC really need to pull out all the stops to ensure the very best quality picture to do justice to the hard work of the show's makers.