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Initially I was really enjoying his programs, but more recently his voice has started to grate a bit and I can only stand watching his programs in 30 minute segments at a time now. He is however much better at getting across things in a way that everyone can understand. Something that many others fail to do in documentaries.
We get NHK World on freesat HD, which is really interesting - it's like a Japanese TV channel, but in English. I watched a programme last night which I've been waiting all week for - Wildlife:Satoyama. It was in HD, and was about people in Japan who are living in small villages and being close to nature. So one area wanted to create a stork breeding ground and they did this by creating rice paddy fields, mainly by hand, and creating a gully from the nearby mountain so that all the meltwater would flood the fields. Shortly after, all the insects started appearing, so all the fish started appearing, and now they have 30 storks living there - all naturally done. Seeing it in HD was amazing!
I think the HD version of NHK World recently launched on Sky too. We have had the SD version of the channel for some time and it definitely has some very interesting programs exploring China and Japan culture.
I like the presentation style when they are interviewing people, it's very supportive and you often have one person asking a leading question so the person being interviewed can seamlessly launch off into their topic - when it's done on English TV it looks too rehearsed and fake, but they make it look like the interviewer is genuinely interested and is inquiring about the subject so it can be explained more for everyone. Also the News style is great - it's just factual, none of the horrible sensationalist stuff we have over here.
Another news channel I like is EuroNews. They don't have any people in studios presenting the news, it is all voice-over and they get through the news much faster and cover a much wider range of news across the whole eurozone.
I got 'Yellowstone' off eBay, sounded quite good, a BBC documentary series doing Yellowstone through the seasons. Popped it into my PS3...watched 5 minutes, the quality wasn't that good. I'm sure the content is interesting but I was expecting a sharp, clear picture and it just didn't deliver. There's a bison or something in the snow, and in the close-up I expected to see the individual hair of it's fur, but it wasn't crisp enough. Even when they did a forest flyover, it's not as detailed as when I've seen it on the few HD channels I've seen. It's done in 1080i but it wasn't crystal-clear quality like I'd been expecting I would get. I think this matches with what reviewers have said, that some of the BBC blu-rays aren't even shot in HD. It wasn't fuzzy, it was just slightly soft-focus which removes all the detail.
I wanted to make sure everything was okay so I tried out my Wall-e blu-ray instead...and lost track of time. Ended up watching the first 30 minutes in awe of the quality of the picture.
Do it properly, BBC!!
It's lazy conversion houses to blame. A lot of HD is just upscaled SD footage. This is evident on Sky because you can tell the planner to highlight programs originally recorded in native HD, and it is surprising how many are not. With Yellowstone I expect it was outsourced to the USA to film, and even though their HDTV is the same specification as it is here, they do still broadcast a lot of stuff in NTSC 60Hz (60FPS) mode and we PAL (50FPS) mode, so if this is the case then they might have needed to convert the footage from 60 to 50 fps.
The only was to guarantee the best cinema film quality Blu-Ray transfer is with discs that have 24fps 1080p recordings as this is true cinema quality (and obviously a TV that supports it).
It is quite a lottery, and sometimes with a decent player with HDMI upscaling a DVD can look better than a proper HD release.
Look at Harry Potter releases. The DVDs have all suffered from quite bad audio quality, and it is evident that they have used the same source material to make the BD versions as the audio is the same. Not good.
Saying all that though, in this day and age it is pretty inexcusable not to have access to the original source footage to make a new HD copy from for the Blu-Ray and HD broadcast versions of a program. Sadly it is more common that no one has access to this and instead the studio houses commissioned with producing the Blu-ray/DVD/HD broadcast have to accept whatever they are handed to work with. When I used to create corporate videos you should have seen some of the footage we were told by the clients we had to use. Often it was a mixture of BetaSP, which is obviously good quality, plus some stuff on degraded VHS or even worse. It used to be a nightmare trying to restore some of the footage into a usable state. And they never had access to the original films, even though they would have been the company responsible for the original commissioning of it. Mad. It is very common to discover companies have no proper backups of most projects. Even the BBC lose loads of their programming and never store copies.
I've been reading reviews of the BBC blu-ray documentaries on blu-ray.com and apparently the US versions are better as they're 24fps, and don't distort the sound as the 25fps UK ones do.