I don't know if it's a psychological thing or what, but although I do like a Big Screen TV... I would prefer the older SQUARE design to the newer WIDE SCREEN types.
Maybe it has something to do with watching the SQUARE TUBE for all of my life or the fact that sometimes, when I'm watching a foorball game over a friends house the players don't look proportioned correctly on the wide screen,
Am I the only one out here that feels that IT"S HIP TO BE SQUARE and would rather pass on the WIDE SCREEN types?
I "think" I can agree with you in your thinking. I have an older style 19" color TV which has sufficed wonderfully since I bought it, as did all the models I had before it. Where I have been introduced to the "big screen" is at a local establisment (not bar) - where I volunteer. The ONLY thing I can say about that - is it is good for viewing since I sit so far away from it when there doing my thing. It is still like sitting up close to the 19" in my home. People I think, like big screens otherwise, because it makes the action seem "life like" - like you're there - it is going on in front of your eyes in your own life - sort of thing - much like the Movie Theatre. And that is ok, I suppose, but I can take it or leave it. After all, I am predisposed to my 19" at the end of the day.
I'll go a step further - HDTV.. I seen a "demo" once - given by a local TV station. Now this place I speak of volunteering at - has one capable of HDTV. Personally, when switching between the modes, "I" see NO difference. Maybe I'm missing something, I don't know..... but if no one told me it was in the HDTV mode, I'd never know it. So, to me at least, I think the hype is too much. IF others like the big screens and HDTV (assuming others aside from Dave are reading this), more power to ya, thats your right to enjoy. Like David, I just don't see anything to write home about. Hell, I'm glad to just have TV to keep up on world events. Otherwise, most of the time, I use it to fall asleep.
I can't recall the make/model of our eh - new HDTV Big Screen, but I think they're too over priced. We have only had the thing like a few months, had trouble with the thing from day one. It had to be repaired like 5 times already. The son of a bitch takes longer to come on than an old Tube set. Changing channels seems to take forever. It occasionally goes off and has to reset itself - which takes like 5 minutes. SCREW THAT....... My set comes on instantly, changes channels instantly and does not shut down when it feels like it. So, that is yet more reason for me to dislike the new fangled JUNK. It sure isn't/wasn't worth the $5,000 + paid for it. To me, NEW is not always necessarily better.
Call me an ole fart, whatever - I like the older style stuff better. It is tried and true. It has proven itself. I'll include an exception. Sets bought say 10 years ago or so, last longer, perform better. Sets made since then - from all I see - are junk. Some lasting only a year.. As soon as the warranty expires, so does the set. PURE JUNK....
Remember the olden days with rounded faced terminals?
Then they invented flat screen monitors, and to try to hide that they weren' REALLY flat they put a thick plastic bezel around the outside edge of the screen that stood out perhaps 1/3" or more.
If you had a decade or more under your belt sitting in front of the old style CRTs the overwhelming feeling was that the new monitor screen was CONCAVE! For months I couldn't get over that feeling.
I also notice that none of the stores ever put a roughly comparable size and price old style television next to a new hdtv. I really think if they were that much better everyone would be showing side by side comparisons. But nobody seems to want a potential buyer to get a direct comparison of the two. They especially don't want to put sets that cost 4x the price but are roughly the same size as the old style sets.
Supposedly one of the chain stores had an "hdtv" that was only 15" I think on sale before christmas for below $200. At that price I might be curious enough to try out hdtv. (Anandtech hot deals web page had the info on this and might still have it, but the chain didn't have any local stores) I also don't know whether it was "really" hdtv or not.
Actually... How can you tell if the ASPECT RATIO or H vs. W RATIO is correct for a football game.
Whenever I watch a game on a widescreen unit... the players look shorter and heavier.
So... in essence, what is the sense of a Widescreen Hi-Def TV if it's not accurately displaying the way it's supposed to look.
I mean... It's one thing to be crystal clear.... but it's another thing to have size distortions.
BTW... do they even make SQUARE HDTVS? What is the fascination and selling points of WIDESCREEN anyway? I'm sure lots like it... but not all, as these posts reflect.
I had to laugh one night, me and a few people were watching this new HDTV I spoke of in previous post(s), and there was a setting wrong, the characters when going near the edge of the screen, looked like they were standing in front of those "Carnival mirrors" which distort the body bigger and so on. Made for fascninating viewing seeing the small women suddenly look like eh - elephants... or their chest size increase ten fold. Needless to say, we got a hoot out of it. I suppose that tv did offer some entertainment - if only for the moment.
In article , jeffm snipped-for-privacy@email.com (known to some as JeffM) scribed...
Are you referring to your TV or your... NEVER MIND! ;-)
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There's a thing called the Golden Rectangle, used by artists for centuries as the rectangle with the most pleasing aspect ratio (about 1.6:1). The old tv screens have a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is quite close to the GR.
Welcome to the wonderful world of transition - as long as both
4:3 (the previous standard aspect ratio) and 16:9 (the "widescreen" HDTV aspect ratio) displays and content exist in the same market, there will be problems in trying to mix-'n'-match between the two. When content AR is mismatched to display AR, you can either stretch or shrink it along the appropriate axis (and live with the resulting distortion) or do such things as "letterboxing." You don't have any other choice.
Of course, once we get to the point where everything is 16:9, no problems...
Hi... Then why is WIDESCREEN so important? Is it kinda just a BUZZWORD?
See... I am not a movie person, and perhaps the WIDESCREEN is targeted in that direction. I am more of a sportsguy.... so that's why I prefer the square display.
BTW... do they make big screen and / or HDTVs with a square display and what is their demand? Or... has the public been swayed by the WIDESCREEN marketing?
To justify the bandwidth the networks argued for high definition TV before Crongrss. When they had the bandwidth allocated for HDTV, they said "hey, wait a minute here - we can make lots more money subletting the spectrum for other uses, leave some open for, pay-per-view or pay-TV encryption, broadcasting more, but lower definition channels, etc.."
It isn't necessarily HDTV, just digital TV
So are we going to watch TV reruns with vertical black bars on a wide screen?
Personally, I think we are being screwed again by the industry with the help of the govt.
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I'm presuming you're asking me, since this appears to be a follow-up to my last post. Quoting a little context would be VERY helpful.
"Widescreen" aspect ratios were seen as a potential differentiating feature for HDTV from the earliest days (basically, when NHK in Japan and others first started looking into some sort of higher- definition TV standard, back in the 1970s). It's an obvious choice, since movies went to wider formats ("Cinemascope" and so forth) back in the 1950s - oddly enough, as a response to what was then seen as the potential threat of TV in the home. The movie industry was looking for its own way to differentiate itself from this upstart new medium, and going wider (which gives a more "immersive" theater experience) was one way to do this.
One minor practical aspect of wider-format television is that it lets you put more information on the screen without raising the line rate, which (esp. when HDTV was first being considered - i.e., with CRT displays in mind) isn't always something you can ignore. But it IS overall a more pleasing format for film and other forms of entertainment programming, in that you DO get a better sense of being immersed in the action.
It's actually not "square" - the original TV standards are all built around a 4:3 (or 1:33 to 1) aspect ratio, which itself came from the original standards of the movie industry. (Google for "Academy standard" for more info.)
While sports, news, etc., might not benefit from the wider format, I can't imagine that it would actually be a detriment, either. In the cases of most sports with which I am familiar, the action DOES generally take place mostly horizontally (i.e., playing fields are rarely vertical planes...:-)), so a wider format should always let you see more of what's going on.
There are clearly no true HDTVs with the 4:3 aspect ratio, since all HDTV standards are based on 16:9. The biggest
4:3 displays are going to be SDTV (standard definition) projection screens.
No, not really. First of all, the "networks" for the most part were not the original proponents of HDTV, although they certainly had a hand in the final standards. But the real error in the above is that HDTV as implemented in the U.S. does not require additional "bandwidth" - the FCC mandated, during the development of the digital/HD standards, that any HDTV system proposed for their consideration would work with the existing 6 MHz TV channels.
This is correct; however, it now looks as though much of the broadcast programming will, in the future, move to the HD formats.
Yes, or put up with the distortion resulting from stretching a
4:3 image to a 16:9 screen. But what's the problem with "black bars," as long as you see the full, undistorted image at an acceptable size?
On the other hand, you will now be able to see pretty much any movie made since the late 1950s, and TV programming made from a few years ago on (much of which was originally shot in wide-format, anticipating the move to HD) in their original aspect ratios or much closer to it. (One little problem is that there is not really one standard film aspect ratio - "standard" movie ARs run from about 1.85:1 to 2.25:1 or even higher.)
Well, you can think that if you like, I suppose. It was pretty clear, though, that the existing analog TV standards could not continue on forever, so there was going to be a change. And in any case of a change, some people won't like it.
1080i HDTV: 37 MHz; in practice with 22 MHz the picture is still very superb.
720p HDTV; 37 MHz.
I seem to remember them getting 9 MHZ channel spacing for their theoretical 37 MHZ maximum bandwidth. Am I wrong?
Channel spacing for NTSC is 6 mhz/channel.
But, frequency range aside, with multiplexing and compression, digital bandwidth is not the same as analog bandwidth . . . Apples and Oranges, so it doesn't do to make a one for one comparison strictly in bandwidth.
The movie and broadcast industries got digital for a variety of reasons both real and stated.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Even with compression and multiplexing when you start selling off part of your resources for things other than HDTV the picture quality has to suffer.
"But there's no snow!" Yeah, but whole blocks of the screen go blank or part of the scene is lagging the rest.
"But people aren't going to bear the cost of switching to digital unless the content is improved." Sure and then the media moguls have another mantra to fall back on "improved content costs money," and then "we have to find a way to recoup our costs."
There's no such thing as a free lunch and if the MPAA, RIAA, BI have any say you won't get the lunch you pay for.
I wasn't born cynical -
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Think about the social aspects of conversion to HDTV. What are the poor people going to do ? They can't afford a convertor box (HDTV to NTSC) let alone a new widescreen TV. Are we working folks going to be buying people on government assistance a convertor box or a new TV ? You know they won't be left in the dark. Will cable companies still provide NTSC and Hi Def ? This is a very big problem that is confronting the USA (not as big as oil) and the clock is ticking. Take Care
They didn't have to "justify the bandwidth". Every licensed analog transmission requires that several other channels (especially on UHF) be excluded from use in that local area. The Bandwidth was there for decades. (Analog TV is horribly easy to screw up. An inband signal
40-60 dB lower can cause interference. DTV isn't, we hope).
The real reason for this shift in technology is that, when they all go to all DTV, they get to auction off the spectrum for all these unusable channels and make zillions of dollars. They (congress and the budget spinners) think...
There was some campaign that, by giving each station two channels during the transition, this was some gross giveaway. Somebody had their head up their ass, or they just didn't care if their spin didn't make sense.
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Sorry, but the only way the original comments could be interpreted (since they were with respect to the "networks" supposedly going to Congress to argue for "additional bandwidth") was that the "bandwidth" in question was actually the allocation of RF spectrum to the television service, and/or the channelization of that allocation. The fact is that HDTV does not occupy more than analog broadcast TV on a per-channel, per-program-stream basis, and actually will wind up with LESS spectrum being allocated to the TV service once the transition is over and the then-unused "analog" channels can be re-allocated.
If you mean "do HDTV broadcasters work in 9 MHz channel spacing?", then yes, you're wrong. U.S. TV channels are, and will remain with the digital system, on 6 MHz spacing. Europe (which will use a somewhat different HD/digital TV standard, namely DVB-T) will similarly keep their 7- and 8-MHz channels.
Well, if you use "bandwidth" as it SHOULD be used, they are - the problem is that too many people confuse "bandwidth" (which deals only with the "width" of a given slice of the frequency spectrum) with "data rate" or "data capacity," which are related but separate questions. Under the U.S. digital standard, a 6 MHz channel is used to carry a "digital" data stream at a standard rate of 19.39 Mbits/sec., which is fairly close to the Shannon limit for such a channel given a
10 dB SNR.
But "suffer" relative to WHAT is the real question? No one ever assumed that HDTV would ever use anything remotely close to the channel width that would be required to carry the uncompressed analog signal(s), even assume interlacing and "NTSC-like" encoding (both of which can be viewed as crude forms of "compression"). Even the original NHK analog HD system didn't do this (the name of that system, "MUSE," stands for MUltiple Sub-Nyquist Encoding, a hint that some interesting things are being done to the analog signl to fit it into the available channel space). You CAN do a lot to a TV signal to get it to take up "less room," given that there is an enormous amount of redundancy in the uncompressed original.
Note that the digital satellite services (DISH Network, DirecTV, etc.) are already providing digital versions of SD programming, at an effective channelization of under 6 MHz/program stream, and with a delivered image quality that compares favorably with over- the-air analog broadcast. I can get the local (Denver) stations both over-the-air and via DirecTV - and I have basically no reason at all to use the over-the-air path.
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