Darren New wrote:

> Myself, I find the compression artifacts tremendously distracting.

You know what I find amusing?

You sit and watch a DVD on your normal TV, and it looks just like normal 
TV. (Except a bit clearer.) Then you go watch the same DVD on your PC, 
and it looks *horrible*! There's black noise, there's big pixel blocks, 
there's bits of background moving at 2 frames per second... and then you 
realis just how lame your TV is.

I once put together a DVD where one animation was at half resolution. 
When you watch it on TV, you can't actually tell the difference... (!)

>> As far as I know, a normal TV operates at something like 300x200 or 
>> so. That means that 4x would only be 600x400 - still extremely low.
> 
> 640x480, actually, for NTSC disregarding overscan.

Mmm, OK.

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>
> > Myself, I find the compression artifacts tremendously distracting.
>
> You know what I find amusing?
>
> You sit and watch a DVD on your normal TV, and it looks just like normal
> TV. (Except a bit clearer.) Then you go watch the same DVD on your PC,
> and it looks *horrible*! There's black noise, there's big pixel blocks,
> there's bits of background moving at 2 frames per second... and then you
> realis just how lame your TV is.

Hmm... something that takes a crappy signal, and makes it look identical to a
good signal... I'd say that that makes yours a GOOD TV, wouldn't you? :)

Anyway, the every step in the video process has the potential to degrade picture
quality, so CG is always going to benefit most from HD, while live movies rely
much more on goo dacting than on good film quality.

....Chambers

Post a reply to this message

"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47469bee@news.povray.org...
> Gail Shaw wrote:
>
> > I priced LCD HD TVs last weekend, and I
> > could get a good one for R7000. (that's somewhere around 450 pounds, if
you
> > convert)
>
> Doesn't mean it's possible to buy it in this country for that price.

SA is notoriously expensive for any form of electonics. I bought my laptop
in the US for $1800 (around R14000 at the time)
To buy it here I'd pay R24000 at least.

While I didn't go electronics shopping in the UK last time I visited, I did
notice that electronics are cheaper there than in SA, though not by as much
as the US is.

Post a reply to this message

Chambers wrote:

> while live movies rely much more on goo dacting than on good film quality.

Priceless! Thanks. :-D

Post a reply to this message

Gail Shaw wrote:

> SA is notoriously expensive for any form of electonics.

I'm not categorically saying you *can't* buy it for that price here, I'm 
just noting that it doesn't *authomatically* follow, that's all. ;-)

> While I didn't go electronics shopping in the UK last time I visited, I did
> notice that electronics are cheaper there than in SA, though not by as much
> as the US is.

I wouldn't know. I've never been to the USA.

BTW, there's an old legend that in America all CDs cost (the equivilent 

another wild exaggeration?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> BTW, there's an old legend that in America all CDs cost (the equivilent 


They cost online roughly what they cost in a store. Check amazon. 
Nowadays they're $8-$12 USD for "normal" stuff.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

Post a reply to this message

> BTW, there's an old legend that in America all CDs cost (the equivilent 

> another wild exaggeration?

($10) I guess that's sort of true, you can find some stuff for that,
the worse your taste is, the cheaper.  Though double that
is perty common for newer stuff. ($20)

Post a reply to this message

Tim Attwood wrote:
>> BTW, there's an old legend that in America all CDs cost (the equivilent 

>> another wild exaggeration?
> 
> ($10) I guess that's sort of true, you can find some stuff for that,
> the worse your taste is, the cheaper.  Though double that
> is perty common for newer stuff. ($20) 


Pink Floyd - then you can *double* the price. Which is odd, considering 

and more still for big boxes of multiple disks - but nothing really 
surprising about that.


something. ;-)

It's just that there's this often-repeated believe that everything is so 
much cheaper in America, and the streets are paved with cheese. Myself I 
rather doubt it. But I've never been there, so...

Post a reply to this message

Chambers wrote:
> Anyway, the every step in the video process has the potential to degrade picture
> quality, so CG is always going to benefit most from HD, while live movies rely
> much more on goo dacting than on good film quality.

Many live movies also rely on 'bad' film quality to give a look & feel. 
Three Kings springs to mind, with the bleached-washed out look. It even 
has a warning just before the film advising viewers not to adjust their 
players or screens!

Michael Mann's recent films (Collateral and Miami Vice) use digital 
cameras to get a more 'documentary' feel with slightly noisy images, and 
to bring out the light of cities at night. He's on record saying that 
you just can't get the same feel using a normal film camera.

The Illusionist uses very subtle darkening at the edges of the frame and 
slight deadening of the colour in certain scenes to suggest a hint of 
how Victorian films looks when played back now (this is when the film is 
set).

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:



for long swathes of time.


> something. ;-)
It's usually 50-50 in that price range, I find. Mind you, one man's 
Mozart is another man's Cheeky Girls...


likely to be popular you're better off waiting 3 months and getting it 

now. I can't believe people don't have the patience to save themselves a 
tenner... Having said that, this seems to apply only to popular titles 
with wildly fluctuating stocks. Rarer titles can be expensive. I 
recently bought The Abyss (special edition). I was watching the price on 

fiver. Eventually I got it second-hand. For a fiver ;-)

Post a reply to this message