If you want to watch the football live in glorious high definition, right now there’s one simple way to do it – subscribe to Sky HD.
With several live games broadcast in full 1080p high-def every week, right now this is the best way of experiencing the beautiful game on your TV with all the detail, smoothness and motion control that 21st century picture technology has to offer. It will make you feel like you’re actually in the stadium – but in a comfier seat.
Why bother with football in high definition? The answer is simple. If your TV is Full HD, then it has a pixel resolution of 1920 x 1080. That’s 1080 horizontal lines of information in every frame.
When you look at standard-definition TV broadcasts, the TV is only receiving 576 horizontal lines. That means the television has to literally ‘make up’ the remaining lines on the fly, by using a clever process known as ‘scaling’.
Scaling involves, literally, the TV adding in the extra pixels, based on the colour and brightness of adjacent pixels. It’s very clever, but not ideal.
But as smart as scaling is, it would be preferable to see what your TV can do when it receives a full-fat 1080 HD signal. When that happens the TV receives via broadcast the exact number of pixels that your TV has to offer. And when that happens, the picture performance of a TV like the Samsung 7020 becomes truly mind-blowing.
Every fold in every shirt, every blade of grass, every shot and every pass: the level of detail you’ll see in the match in HD will amaze you. And just as important, with every pixel on your TV’s screen properly catered for, the path of the ball as it moves through air will be rendered more accurately.
Have you ever noticed, when watching football on TV, that when your team’s centre-half lobs a hopeful ‘route-one’ punt forward at the leggy centre forward, the ball looks like its bending slightly as it moves through the air? Well, that’s just your TV struggling to make up for an inferior incoming signal.
Watch your live football in HD, however, and the motion of the ball will be rendered in smooth, perfect detail.