Does the new High Definition TV service live up to its hype? It is a good question and one that is harder to answer than you might have thought. As you already know if you haven’t put down your £299 for a Sky HD box when the offer was launched back in April you won’t see your box for some time. My High Definition box arrived a couple of weeks ago.

Firstly the installation went fine – I did run foul of the problem with the wrong card being put in the wrong box – after a few calls to Sky they told me that the “Primary” card was the one in my standard digibox and once that was in the HD box all was fine – even better I was happy that I could still see my Sky+ recordings (good as recordings on Sky+ boxes are keyed to the card for playback - change the card and you can't get to your recordings).

Connecting up to my screen was an interesting exercise mainly because I have a 6 year old Pioneer MX-502 Plasma that doesn’t (as is the case with many early plasma screens) do 50Hz HD. I have always been very happy with the SD picture on this screen and so I decided to stick with it and get a scalar to do rate conversion from 50 to 60Hz – I chose Calibre’s, UK designed, Vantage HD after some research. It arrived the same day as Sky HD so I was keeping my fingers crossed that it would work.

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