So what's the truth about lead-free solder ?

On a sunny day (Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:31:48 GMT) it happened "Arfa Daily" wrote in :

A very interesting posting. Indeed. Sure, we must see that the 'aim of the game' is to sell new stuff to the customers. In many case 'new' is not 'better', as we see for example with mp3 on portable players and even being played via HiFi, but then Vinyl was better then 44100 CD LOL hahahahahaha Well according to some anyways. In the same way MPEG2 (or H264) or whatever compression is not a lossless compression and YES has artefacts, BUT these are (the system is designed that way) not normally percieved as anying.

The truth for me is that movies I have seen in the past on VHS do not touch me more then movies I see in HD, or normal digital.

So 37 years, that puts you back to 1970, I started in professional broadcasting in 1968.... Almost a year after color started here. I have seen it all, from iconoscope camera upwards...

So, anyways, stuff needs to be sold, the madness started with widescreen, stretching people so they became really short and fat, and the consumer bought it... LOL

And even that still goes on. In the early color days transmisisons were closely guarded by many specialized capable engineers with years of experience and training. Thse days anyone can but a digital camera and produce quality that is better. Or quality that is worse.

I have my house wired with cat, RJ45 is the connector, no UHF cables here, except form an antenne in the attick for long range digital terrestial.

I absolutely have to disagree about the quality of HD satellite versus analog PAL, you must be joking right?

At a resolution of 1980x1080i there is NO WAY analog can compare. I wanted to show you a screenshot, so I tuned to Astra HD promo, shows National Geograhics Channel, I have to agree no HD material :-) just flipper in the water etc....

The French had much better high detail demos.....

Of course if you watch 1920x1080 progressive downscaled via UHF on a PAL TV in the other room it will not be better then than PAL TV's say

and there's

Actually it was

of nonsence

the CWT (centre

That part landed in the water, idiot. I am talking about the show, so don't go getting confused, cockroach. I know how easy it is for you to forget how to grasp what you read.

Here is a screenshot of a testcard from satellite: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/testcard-2.png So what is wrong?

767x576 png, how you have a monitor with that resolution ;-)

Now this picture travelled > 40000 km.

On a sunny day (Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:01:51 GMT) it happened "Arfa Daily" wrote in :

That makes no sense, terrestial digital, here where I am, uses the SAME bandwith as satellite. An HOW can you compare the 2 things if you watch both on the same set? Of course it will be worse, now you have the problems of BOTH, minus the advantages of digital. As I stated before: Buy a good digital setup.

The best purchase you can make for examining such things:

I cannot do a capture from the HD DVD output, but I'd bet that even my Std DVD (it's a combo disc) side would look quite good coming though the computer, and I could post it in a.b.s.e.

This oughtta be good... ;-]

On a sunny day (Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:59:17 +0100) it happened Chris Jones wrote in :

Well, OK, may I suggest Seagate HDs, I have one up 24/7 now for 6 years. Other shorter, but no failures so far, other makes have long ago failed. Yes PC boot up is slow, but having the PC allows one to also easily check the program schedules, read background info on programs, use VOIP, watch YouTube, post to Usenet etc.. something your granny would love to do I am sure. I would not trust anything to a repair shop.... LOL I know repair shops. ;-)

On a sunny day (Fri, 27 Jul 2007 03:23:26 -0700) it happened Spurious Response wrote in :

If you want to test the monitor, Nokia monitor test is really nice:

Good for CRT monitors, but also reveals a lot about LCD.

Very NICE!

Flawless even. Thanks!

On a sunny day (Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:15:16 GMT) it happened Jan Panteltje wrote in :

Actually there is something wrong in that testcard due to 16:10 aspect translation, here is the one from a normal 4:3 screen: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/testcard.png

This one is 1:1 pixel for pixel as it is received, the previous one was rescaled to 767x576, this one is as it comes in here in 720x576 PAL. Now that is a lot better!

Well, I have a friend who runs a large Sky installation company, and he has the latest dog's bollocks HD Sky box, and the latest dog's bollocks 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

See my response ref my friend's 'good digital setup'

Arfa

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

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.... :-)

Exactly.... it's dumbing down.

No surprise were're breeding a generation of idiots.

Graham

Can you remind me how The Prisoner ended ?

If you haven't been to Portmeirion you should btw. It's a lovely place. It's the ultimate 'folly'.

Graham

Most posters seemed to be comparing the 'normal' signal that's readily available to us via terrestrial broadcast, cable or satellite. Certainly not any HD ones.

Graham

wing and there's

Actually it was

kind of nonsence

the CWT (centre

Obfuscation noted.

So you accept that not all the fuel is stored in the wings or not ?

Graham

Have you considered a brain transplant ?

A stationary picture is no way to evaluate the quality of a compressed signal. It eliminites the most offensive aspect of compression, motion artifacts.

Graham

And I had two of their top flight Barracuda series ( SCSI server types ) die in under a month each.

Graham

On a sunny day (Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:44:31 +0100) it happened Eeyore wrote in :

No, but come to think of it, yes, yours.

Look mr rabbit, if I had made available a video clip, you would have complained you needed a real testcard, and I would be sued for copyright infrigment.