Acknowledging the growing market of HDTV sets with plummeting prices, DTH operator Airtel has announced that it will soon upscale all the channels of its DTH (Direct-To-Home) service to 1080i or HD display resolution. The advantage of this would be better image quality of those same signals on HDTVs, and the lingering issue of bad aspect ratio should also be taken care of.
Airtel has promised an enhanced contrast ratio with sharper, brighter and more vivid picture quality on over 250 of the channels offered by their service, and the best thing is that this comes at no extra charge for all Airtel digital TV HD and HD Recorder customers. Better sound quality will be offered when compared to existing Standard Definition (SD) transmission.
Sugato Banerji, Chief Marketing Officer (Airtel digital TV), Bharti Airtel said, "We believe that these initiatives will help build category awareness in the HD market that has an increasing number of customers trying out various options that can help enhance their Standard Definition viewing experience".
While the experience would be truly better than SD, we must warn you against expecting anything close to what you get while watching true HD channels such as Discovery, Nat Geo or some sports channels.