Sky Picture Quality

[headcase]

Has anyone else noticed that the SD SKY picture quality has gone really poor lately? and im not just talking about my setup, its even got to the point where we have had old people booking service calls thinking it was their TV at fault! I cant help suspecting they have done this to try to push the HD services. In fact its driven more people over to freeview as the picture quality seems to be far better using that platform at the moment.
Which leads me to my next question, are there ANY half decent Freeview boxes out there? by half decent i mean one that dosent have to be reset every 5 mins and has the more advanced SKY type program guide, i have experiance of Thomson, Goodmans, Humax, Philips, Sharp Finlux (Vestel crap) all of wich generally die if you switch channels too often or just have the basic now/next guide or just freeze and require a reset for no apparent reason. Out of that list the Humax seem to be the best but even they lock up.

[OldSkoolRS]

My parents had a Sony Freeview box and they moaned like hell about the Humax recorder I got them (ungreatful parents eh?!), but I don't know if the model is still available, ended in '800'. At least it seemed very stable even compared to the Humax, which maybe locked up once or twice a week. I use a Sony HDD/DVD recorder for watching upscsaled Freeview as it has a HDMI output and goes direct into my Lumagen VP (gives a noticable better PQ than the Sony TV using it's own internal Freeview tuner), yet I don't have lock up issues with the Sony, so maybe there's something in what my parents said.