May I inject a small dose of practical reality and a sense of scale to all this?
My premise is that the general public doesn't know, or CARE much about the technicalities of TV, DTV, HDTV, smart phones or anything else related as long as they can see some
kind of an image to watch.Corollary: It's far more important for people to be able to say, "Look at my really great HDTV
system. Bet you don't have anything like this."The proof of this was offered up tonight on ABC's "America's Funniest home Videos" program. In the middle of the Show, the host introduced and narrated a short presentation on how to
"hold" your smart phone to make a video to upload to the show.Apparently [to wit: several examples in tonight's program] many people hold their phones vertically and upload 'portrait' type images to the show.
He demonstrated FOUR TIMES the difference between 'portrait' and 'landscape' with images each time in succession, and the question, "which one looks better? The full picture on the screen or the one with the huge black bars on the sides?"
Then he showed the phone, rotated it vertically and said 'portrait' then rotated it again horizontally and said 'landscape'.
This sort of instructional video has aired before as a part of this program. Several times I think.
This is proof enough for me that all the modern technical innovation in television is viewed pretty much by the general public as a 'toy counter' to show off as a status symbol
rather than a technological wonder of the age. 'Now back to your regularly scheduled discussion.' Cliff On 10/21/2012 7:38 PM, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
Mark Schubin wrote:As to cognitive dissonance, watching a movie (or opera) in a cinema requires a financial outlay for a ticket, travel to the cinema, blocking out time, and possibly such other costs/requirements as getting a baby sitter, parking/transit fees, dinner, etc. If, after all of that, the viewer doesn't like the movie, then all of the expenditures of money and time were foolish. But the viewer doesn't want to be a fool, so there is a predisposition to like the event.That cracked me up. I completely agree with this and your other points. I suppose that if the average joe went to the movies every day, some other activity would become the "event," and the movie-going would be more like watching TV. The theaters we usually go to suddenly all switched over to Sony Digital Cinema 4K, which is just about exactly twice as much horizontal and vertical as 1080p HDTV: 4096 X 2160. The ads and other features that come before the show, and before the actual movie previews, are instead 16:9 SDTV. We like to sit about half-way up the seats, in the stadium style theaters. So the screen looks quite large, compared with how we watch the 42" HDTV at home. Anyway, it's easy enough to "count the pixels" when the SD pre-show stuff is showing, but the Sony 4K, even on the 2:35:1 blockbuster format, is beyond reproach, as far as I'm concerned. I'm wondering whether any more than that even makes sense in a home format, even if 100" screens became the new normal. A 100" screen is about 50" high and 87" wide. At say 10' viewing distance (too close for comfort, IMO), that's a distance of 2.4 picture-heights. So that calculates out to an angular separation of the pixels of 0.66 arcminutes at the viewer's vantage point, which ought to be well within what the majority of people can discern (the literature indicates anything from 1 to 2 arcmin, many claim 1.5). Even acknowledging that any such numbers are just first order approximations of actual visual acuity. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.
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