On a sunny day (Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:10:53 GMT) it happened "Arfa Daily"
wrote in :

Well, I have a friend who runs a large Sky installation company, and he has
the latest dog's ******** HD Sky box, and the latest dog's ******** Sony all
singing and dancing LCD widescreen TV and home cinema system, all hooked
together HDMI, and when he showed me it on a Sky HD demo (and presumably Sky
have hand picked this content to be the best available, unless the Frogs
know something that they don't) I have to say that I was a little
disappointed. Yes, when you get right up to the screen, you can see the
hairs on the bee's legs - very impressive - but when you sit far enough back
for the viewing of that size of TV to be 'comfortable', the resolution of
your eyes is not good enough to pick out that level of detail anyway.

I would have to be stupid to maintain that on paper at least, the digital
satellite broadcasts in HD are not better than analogue PAL transmissions,
but subjectively, as I have been maintaining from the start, on a good
analogue TV with a good analogue signal going in, there is not a lot to
choose, and unless you are talking top-notch digital as in satellite HD, in
many cases, I still maintain that subjectively (there's that word again...)
the PAL analogue solution wins out over the average digital one. There are
also, of course, undeniable advantages to digital TV, but I really don't
think at this stage, that picture quality is one of them.

Of course, the artifacts placed on the picture by the digital display device
only serve to exacerbate the situation, but that's another story ...

Arfa

OK, that is a good argument, how far away you are from the screen.
I am getting old and near-sighted, I need glasses to see small detail
close up, so that does require me to sit close in front of a big monitor with
glasses, or get a projection screen of huge size..... without glasses.
I am close to the monitor, close to the TV.
I can still see pixels on the 1680x1050 screen, so I am not too worried.
Finally managed to grap some sort of HD content from SkyPromo:
ftp://panteltje.com/pub/00000300.ppm

1920x1088 Now how about PAL composite ;-)

This is how I grabbed it in Linux:
xdipo -c 1 -g '10.5 E' -f 12610.5 -p v -s 22000 -a 133 134 -o q1.ts

The 10.5 replace it where you see the satellite,
the recording is transport stream q1.ts
I wrote xdipo.


Then I let it run for a few seconds, and converted all frames to pnm
pictures with the magic command:
mplayer -vo pnm q1.ts
This generated
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6266897 2007-07-27 16:50 00000001.ppm
.....
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6266897 2007-07-27 16:50 00000300.ppm
.......

300 had at least some detail.

Now you need a 1980x10808 monitor.....

More then 6MB for a screenshot.... :-)