At 7:36 AM -0400 4/28/05, Tom Barry wrote: >Your filter really is quite impressive. But I tend to visualize >the sudden loss of detail just by visualizing a possible MTF >curve. If there was only mild detail in the original above 544 >then filtering that amount would not be noticeable. But possibly >when you filter at 480 then the cut off point starts climbing the >steeper shoulder of the MTF curve, suppressing frequencies that >really exist in the image to some degree. And the actual >perceived sharpness is the square of this ratio, so it is more >like (480/544)^2 = .778. Tom is on the right track here. The difference between 480P and 544P is indeed visible to the average viewer. This is my take on why, and why this is very important. As I suggested (hopefully correctly), the ability to represent high contrast details in an image is related to the cut-off frequency of the required filters to meet the requirements of the sampling theorem. As we increase the density of the sampling grid, we can represent higher frequency details with increased contrast, up to the point where the samples accurately reproduce the intensity of the information "seen" by the camera (or created via a synthetic test signal). What I believe we are dealing with here is the relationship between the visual acuity of the viewer and the ability of any sampling grid to equal or surpass that level of acuity. There are many metrics at work here. The number of vertical lines in an image determines the level of vertical detail that can be passed (the use of interlace and the required filtering also influences this). Likewise the number of samples per line determines the level of horizontal detail that can be represented. When the world agreed to standardize on a common sampling rate for SDTV - i.e. ITU-R.BT601 - we made the horizontal resolution the same for everyone, but we left the rather large difference between 480 and 576 lines in place. 576 line systems traded off temporal resolution for increased vertical spatial resolution - to me these images have ALWAYS appeared to be sharper. Based on many tests that I have performed over the years, it appears that both PAL and NTSC are not capable of saturating the acuity of the average viewer at the designed viewing distance. If we eliminate interlace and compare high resolution images that are downsampled respectively to 480P and 576P there is a very noticeable difference in vertical detail. This example is a bit more extreme than the difference between 480P and 544P that Jeroen noted, but it relates to the same phenomenon. Somewhere in the continuum from 480P to 544/576P to 720P we begin to saturate the human visual system, at least in terms of the highest level of detail that the average viewer can perceive. Clearly things keep improving along this continuum, but once we get passed the stuff that everyone can see easily, the addition of more detail become less critical or noticeable. I think Tom is correct about "the square of the ratio." As we raise the area under the MTF curve, we reach the point where everyone perceives a sharp image - as we keep going each incremental step becomes less obvious. This is one of the reasons that I have long believed that we should raise the floor on image quality to 544/576P as a baseline. 480P cuts off well within the average acuity of viewers. With 576P we see very significant improvements. But we also need to increase the level of horizontal detail to match. With 601 the limit of 720 samples per line becomes a significant factor. There is a huge difference in perceived detail when we increase from 720 x 576 to 1024 x 576. &20 samples per line was adequate for an interlaced system since the vertical detail is so "low," but when we remove the interlace footprint we need to bring the horizontal resolution up to match. If Tom and Jeroen have time to play, I would like to see a down/up sample pass through 1024 x 576P. My educated guess is that it will be nearly impossible to see the difference from the original. Regards Craig ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.