Humax HD-FOX T2 and Panasonic TX-P42G20B become the first Freeview HD tuners on sale in the UK
By Vlad Savov 
posted February 19th 2010 9:16AM
posted February 19th 2010 9:16AM
posted February 19th 2010 9:16AM
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I'm sure you meant 600Hz when you wrote 600MHz. It's not a biggie, just a million times greater number than it should be. :)
@SlimSpaceman Yes, yes I did. But hey, what's a million times multiplier between friends?
@Vlad Savov
Don't worry, the lower figure isn't realistic either. 600Hz is just more nonsense to confuse consumers.
With regular Freeview boxes going for as little as £19.99 where is the value for money in getting the same content but "better" for a £160 premium? Limited content at that!
@Tes bragging rights. Basic HD boxes will probably be £75 before the year is out. A couple years after HD rolls out the SD only boxes will disappear entirely.
Wait so this is just a HD OTA tuner? Why in the hell is it so expensive? Well we may be getting raped on cell service in the states, but at least OTA HD tech has run its course and is now cheaply and readily available.
@KAL326 It is a new technology, The roll-out of DVB-T2 in Britain is the first in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T2
@KAL326 It's the first use of a DVB-T2 decoding chip. A lot of other OTA HD systems use MPEG4 over DVB-T, but the UK is among the first to roll out DVB-T2. Hence the high price for the decoding chips.
@KAL326 It's not OTA: it's satellite. The UK actually gives you free satellite TV for reception - with some channels actually worth watching, compared to, say, a handful of PBS and CBS/FOX affiliates.
http://freeview.co.uk/freeview/Channels
@dragonfli
Nope, its definitely terrestrial OTA.
http://freeview.co.uk/freeview/Help/Aerials-and-Reception/Aerials-and-reception-explained
Same with FreeviewHD
http://freeview.co.uk/freeview/Resolutions/About-Freeview-HD/About-Freeview-HD/What-is-Freeview-HD
@dragonfli
"it's satellite"
no.. no it's not.. that's freesat...
@MrJamesBrown Ah so the devil's in the glaringly absent details, on the surface this just looks like your run of the mill OTA receiver with a high dollar price tag.
@dragonfli
I think your confusing freeview with freesat. Incidently free-to-view HD broadcasts have be avalible via freesat for a while now.
@TacticalTimbo
Ahhhhhhh...spelling mistakes!
How will this affect http://www.freesat.co.uk? Is there room for both Freeview HD and Freesat in the UK? Both Humax and Panasonic have promoted Freesat and released good products. Now they are promoting Freesat. Does Freeview have the bandwidth to provide HD content? Regular content on Freesat is often poor quality. Then again better picture quality didn't help Betamax versus VHS.
@S Ellerington
Freeview SD uses MPEG-2 - so needs a lot of bandwidth for a decent picture.
Freeview HD uses MPEG-4 - so a lower bandwidth needed.
So, the new Freeview HD boxes need to have 2 decoders for the different signals.
What I want is for the existing Freeview channels to move to MPEG-4 so for the same bandwidth we can gave a better image or other channels can come online or we can have more HD content.
Isn't the Freeview HD the same thing as DVB-T HD that's available in the rest of the Europe for some time now? Because there are plenty of TV sets that have integrated MPEG4 tuners for (at least) the last 18 months. So why is it coming so late and as such a big thing in the UK?
My opinion is that is all a well thought plot to milk the cash out of people's wallets: first they gave us HD ready TVs with only analog tuners, then came digital (DVB-T MPEG2) tuners, and of course, at the very end there were TVs with integrated DVB-T and DVB-C (both supporting MPEG2 and MPEG4) tuners. In the mean time, they didn't educate their customers, so they waited for everyone to buy the first round of slim and sexy TVs (compared to old CRTs), and little by little started adding "value added" stuff like those digital tuners .....(which you then sometimes had to hack the TV set to enable them i.e. Philips - digital tuner was country-dependant, /so that meant that if you were living in a country that wasn't on their list of countries that had digital terrestrial broadcasting - no digital tv for you, and it didn't matter if you changed your location in settings to another country, you had to punch in the service code and go into the service menu where you had to find and unlock that functionality/).....plus all the other things, but the bottom line is, if you don't want a cable/IPTV set top box, and want to watch HD over the air, you'll either buy a new tv or a rather pricey stb.
@sommer
No, it's DVB-T2, which is a much more efficient carrier. For once I think our usually idiotic regulators have done the right thing. No point in moving to HD over DVB-T, then complain in a few years that we've run out of bandwidth for HD; and tell everyone to buy yet another TV/box to get the same HD, just over a different carrier, and maybe a few more (HD) shopping channels.
The UK is finishing its roll out of SD Freeview in 2012.
The HD standard is a different encoder, so it looks like there is going to be a need for 2 different digital standards to run side by side as the old tuners will not decode the new signals.
I know I'm waiting to see what happens with the Freeview HD before deciding whether to go with FreeSat or Freview HD.
@alberth
At the moment Freesat has the advantage of (limited) HD content available nationwide, whereas Freeview is rolling out regionally over the next couple of years. The big question is will both platforms survive?
My area will get Freeview sometime in 2011 so I think I'll wait till then to get a box.
Price should be below £100 by then.
Can/will PlayTV get a firmware update so I can get HD through my PS3?
@kaprikawn Na it won't, it requires different hardware to decode DVB-T2 so they'll have to launch a new version of PlayTV for the UK to enable it to receive Freeview HD.
@kharma45
Cheers for the info. I'll hold off upgrading my PS3 harddrive then if it's not going to be a viable long-term solution for freeview. I'll maybe look into a HTPC solution or something then.