Saturday 22 January 2011

Simple pleasures nr 10: HD television


If you are about my age - which means not extremely young anymore - you will remember the first television broadcasts; the entire family gathered every evening in front of the miniscule telly in order to watch the favourite black and white programmes. Now - in  my case - over half a century later, we have enormous flat screens with High Definition quality picture and sound. A change to the better, which we, at least in my opinion, have to be grateful for.

Nowadays I watch mostly German language HD channels. The two main channels Erste and ZDF are technically of a very high quality, but they seldom show anything of great interest to myself - although they sometimes (particularly at Christmas time) surprise by broadcasting great concerts of classical music, opera and documentaries. My favourite HD channel is the German-French ARTE, which offers a great selection of high quality arts programmes and documentaries. Thanks to the HD technique, the picture quality is amazing. It is particularly fascinating to watch concert broadcasts and nature programmes.

Another German language HD channel is Austrian Servus TV, which in my opinion has the best HD picture quality of them all, although not all of their programmes are interesting from my point of view.

Then there is the additional bonus, that even the old dvd:s look great on HD equipment. The old classic "An American in Paris" looked like a new film, when I watched it on my HD blueray player the other day.

So, I say thank you to all of you out there somewhere, who have worked hard in order to give us the possibility to enjoy high quality HD television!

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