If you are from the United Kingdom then you will be aware of how mushy and soft and undetailed digital broadcasts can be and most broadcasts can have edge enhancement as standard to try and sharpen up the poor image quality.
Many of the smaller channels will have huge amounts of blocking going on in the backgrounds. In my region we are now all digital and cannot pick up terrestrial broadcasts anymore and i recall how the advertisements would originally talk about the superior image quality that digital would bring, now they concentrate on telling us how we will get more choice and more channels because they know the broadcasts are actually inferior to a well installed terrestrial analogue image.
Indeed even sound quality is worse than the old analogue broadcasts which gave us NICAM at over 750kbp/s. Now we get digital compressed sound and usually under 128kbp/s.
Thankfully the future of broadcasting is HD and there is now an affordable option for those who have been waiting for prices to fall.
I bought the Bush HD Freesat box around a month ago and there are some issues with it but it performs very well with high definition images.
The issues with the box are that it appears to not have a heatsink inside and it gets hot during the day so i would personally recommend it's switched off on warm days and perhaps on warm nights a small fan can blow air at the unit and make sure the air vents are never blocked.
The box sometimes loses sound when flicking through channels, it's an intermittment problem and does not happen that often but when it does i find the unit only restores sound by unplugging and plugging back in.
Standard definition images appear slightly softer when you have chosen 1080i but that's not a deal breaker since many of the SD channels look so bad anyway.
At the moment only the BBC and ITV transmit in high definition but once there is capacity on the Astra satellite Channel 4 and Channel 5 have signalled their intent to transmit free to air HD programming. I hope this will happen sometime during 2010.
BBC sports broadcasts look very good in HD and they also recently transmitted the film Becoming Jane in full widescreen 2.35:1 on their HD channel despite the fact the normal SD channel was showing the film 1.78:1. Hopefully more films will be transmitted by the BBC in HD and in the original widescreen format rather than the usual cropped ratio that the BBC adopts for it's SD channels. In The Loop is on the BBC soon and being shown in HD.
I actually sent a complaint to the BBC recently asking that they raise their bitrate back to previous levels and that they start transmitting films in HD since they appear to not show films at all on the HD channel. Becoming Jane was the first film i had seen transmitted on the channel since the box was bought. I hope they start transmitting a lot more.
The Bush Freesat HD box is ugly but it performs reasonably well and i think it's worth it if you want HD broadcasts now and don't want to pay Sky ridiculous money.
The Bush box has the following features below and if you already have a dish it's easy to get it going and can be bought for around £67 from Argos.
Digital text.
LNB in.
Digital video broadcasting (DVB) subtitles.
Auto setup.
Auto detection of new channels.
Now and next electronic programme guide.
8 day electronic programme guide.
2 SCART sockets.
HDMI output socket.
Upscales to 1080i.
Remote control.
Audio description (broadcast mix) (Freesat service dependent).
Fully interactive with LAN port for connection to broadband (Freesat service dependent).
Could I get information about the Bush freesat receiver that a friend bought for me from UK, whether in could be used for free-to-air satellites here in west africa.
I have no idea, i did try an internet search for you and came up with this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_band#Europe_and_Africa
Perhaps try a specialist satellite internet forum that may be able to help you further. Have you tried using it and tuning in any signals, i was under the impression the Bush receiver was made for the UK since you do need to put a postcode in, try putting a UK postcode in and some information and see if it tunes anything in.
I did that and it quickly starts an auto scan which I know would not yield anything. I guess all i need now is how to cancel the auto scan so that I can manually feed it with my preferred satellites and frequencies. Thanx.
Let me go look at mine and i’ll tell you if its possible to manually tune.
Ok, you go into the menu system and into settings and choose add non freesat services, from there you can manually tune in a channel.
You may find the frequencies in West Africa are different though so although it may be possible to pick up the channels its also possible you may need to insert the frequency differently, for example a channel which is normally tuned in at 10,900 ghz might be 11.200GHZ in West Africa on this receiver, not saying thats the case but it might be.
I appreciate you quick responses. My receiver does not give me the option to go to the menu. After inserting the postcode, it immediately starts the auto scan, after which it doesn't respond to the remote command. The only two pages that apprear are the postcode page and the auto scan, that's that. If I can get it to open the menu page, I would be O.K. Thanx.
Try letting it do the auto scan – Might take a bit of time but let it try and do its auto scan and that may get you into the menu.
There might be another way such as a secret menu which some manufacturers have but i couldn’t say for sure with this model.
Try asking at this site, there should be someone there who can give you a definative answer, it could well be that the receiver will only work in the UK but there may also be a hack around to get it to work elsewhere.
http://www.satellites.co.uk/forums/