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. Since i did a recent firmware update this particular issue appears to have gone.

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 you can get Channel 4, BBC and BBC 1, STV, NHK World and ITV 1 transmitting in high definition but Channel 5 have signalled their intent to transmit free to air HD programming. I hope this will happen sometime during 2012.

BBC sports broadcasts look good in HD and they are transmitting more films on their HD channels although their low bitrate causes some image issues.  Hopefully the BBC will listen to customer complaints and up their bitrate, really we need around 16 to 18mbp/s for really good quality.

I actually sent a complaint to the BBC recently asking that they raise their bitrate back to previous levels and that they start transmitting all their films in HD.  Becoming Jane was the first film i had seen transmitted on the channel since the box was bought. I hope they up bitrates, quality over quantity is my motto.

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, Sky also cram in lots of HD channels on their service and use too low a bitrate, although thats just my opinion.

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 £69.99 from Argos.