WOW! Last night I had the opportunity to watch a series of different Pixar 
shorts in bluray format (I just checked on Amazon and you can buy the disc 
with them all on).

I had watched most of these before as they come on the DVDs of the proper 
films.

But Oh My God, the picture quality was amazing.  I still love "for the 
birds" the best, and never before had I seen so much detail, it was like 
watching a series of photos rather than a film.  There was just so much more 
visible compared to the DVD version, you could see scratches on every little 
bird's beak, the texture on the feathers was visible, it was just incredible 
compared to the blur you get on DVD in the same areas.

Even my gf who is very anti-any-improvement-over-her-21-inch-CRT-TV demanded 
that I buy a bluray player!!

Taking a screen-cap somehow wouldn't do it justice, to see that much detail 
in motion is just beautiful - you really just have to see it.

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That's interesting. I was in some shop the other day, and they had a 
huge LCD with "HD Ready" splashed all over it, and huge cardboard signs 
saying "WOW! LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE!" And I remember thinking "...I 
can't see any difference."

I mean, let's face it, HD is only 4x the imagine resolution. If you 
compare the two side by side you'd probably notice. But if you just look 
at an HD TV, there really isn't much to notice. The picture is very 
slightly more crisp, but that's about it.


more crisp picture. I could buy a *car* for that amount of money! Hell, 
I could almost buy a copy of *Oracle* for that!

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Invisible wrote:

> more crisp picture.

That's a slight exaggeration. You can buy an HD1080 TV with a suitable 



I had to buy a new TV recently. I didn't really want to, because I don't 
yet have any HD sources, but it seemed easiest just to cave in and get a 
nice shiny one that will cope with it when I get around to it...

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Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Invisible wrote:

>> more crisp picture.
> 
> That's a slight exaggeration. You can buy an HD1080 TV with a suitable 



Ah, so the shop was overpriced too? :-D

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> That's interesting. I was in some shop the other day, and they had a huge 
> LCD with "HD Ready" splashed all over it, and huge cardboard signs saying 
> "WOW! LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE!" And I remember thinking "...I can't see any 
> difference."

They were probably feeding in some crappy HD or worse even SD material... 
NExt time take along a copy of the pixar shorts on blu-ray and ask them to 
play that on a 1080p TV.  It will knock you out!

> I mean, let's face it, HD is only 4x the imagine resolution.

"only".  What resolution do run your desktop in?  Now imagine dividing that 
by 4.  It wouldn't be pretty...



You mean getting one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-HD-E1-High-Definition-Player/dp/B000I7IHHI

and one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/LG-37LF66-Widescreen-1080P-Freeview/dp/B000TLW0TE

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scott wrote:
>> That's interesting. I was in some shop the other day, and they had a 
>> huge LCD with "HD Ready" splashed all over it, and huge cardboard 
>> signs saying "WOW! LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE!" And I remember thinking 
>> "...I can't see any difference."
> 
> They were probably feeding in some crappy HD or worse even SD 
> material... NExt time take along a copy of the pixar shorts on blu-ray 
> and ask them to play that on a 1080p TV.  It will knock you out!

They were running National Geographic HD. (Doesn't mean they had an HD 
decoder of course...) Lots of long short of mountains, jungles, big 
savanas and stuff that's clearly meant to make you go "wow". It honestly 
didn't look much different to what I get on my 7 year old TV at home.

They also had a huge widescreen round the corner playing Star Wars III. 
(It is unclear whether or not that was meant to be HD.) It was 
unimpressive. In so many ways... ;-)

>> I mean, let's face it, HD is only 4x the imagine resolution.
> 
> "only".  What resolution do run your desktop in?  Now imagine dividing 
> that by 4.  It wouldn't be pretty...

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.

(I remember I once plugged my laptop into the TV because we didn't own a 
DVD player. The Windows desktop was... unreadable. Literally, you just 
couldn't read *any* of the writing! But then, I guess usually you sit 12 
feet from your TV screen, so they're not going to bother making it able 
to display tiny writing like that...)


> 
> You mean getting one of these:
> 
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-HD-E1-High-Definition-Player/dp/B000I7IHHI
> 
> and one of these:
> 
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/LG-37LF66-Widescreen-1080P-Freeview/dp/B000TLW0TE
> 


I think we've established that the shop was overpriced. ;-)

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>> "only".  What resolution do run your desktop in?  Now imagine dividing 
>> that by 4.  It wouldn't be pretty...
>
> 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.

The shorts I watched last night were 1920x1080 resolution...

> (I remember I once plugged my laptop into the TV because we didn't own a 
> DVD player. The Windows desktop was... unreadable. Literally, you just 
> couldn't read *any* of the writing! But then, I guess usually you sit 12 
> feet from your TV screen, so they're not going to bother making it able to 
> display tiny writing like that...)

If you buy a 1080p TV though, that means that it is 1920x1080 resolution. 
If you plug your PC into it (either by DVI->HDMI or analog VGA) and set your 
PC to a 1920x1080 screen mode it will look perfect.

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scott wrote:
>>> "only".  What resolution do run your desktop in?  Now imagine 
>>> dividing that by 4.  It wouldn't be pretty...
>>
>> 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.
> 
> The shorts I watched last night were 1920x1080 resolution...

Interesting. My PC monitor doesn't go that high. (!)

Must take some serious MPEG compression to fit that onto a disk - even a 
bluray disk has only finite storage capacity.

>> (I remember I once plugged my laptop into the TV because we didn't own 
>> a DVD player. The Windows desktop was... unreadable.)
> 
> If you buy a 1080p TV though, that means that it is 1920x1080 
> resolution. If you plug your PC into it (either by DVI->HDMI or analog 
> VGA) and set your PC to a 1920x1080 screen mode it will look perfect.

My laptop doesn't go that high. ;-)

(Also, it has only VGA and S-Video output. I managed to find an S-Video 
to SCART converter, which allows me to connect to the TV.)

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Invisible wrote:
>>> I mean, let's face it, HD is only 4x the imagine resolution.
>>
>> "only".  What resolution do run your desktop in?  Now imagine dividing 
>> that by 4.  It wouldn't be pretty...
> 
> 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.

I think the PAL standard is 576 lines. The digital SDTV standard is 
640x480, the same vertical resolution as the NTSC standard (wikipedia is 
telling me all this). The 1080p image is therefore 3 times wider, but 
only 2.5 times taller because of the different aspect ratio. I guess 
that's 7.5 times the area.

If the images you saw were mountains and lakes and so forth then they 
probably weren't showing off the picture properly. You often see CG 
movies like Ice Age used as demos in shops because the picture is much 
sharper than a corresponding live-action movie (one of the many reasons 
CG stands out so much).

I think the difference is a bit like upgrading to power-assisted 
steering from an older car to a newer car. At first you think "well, 
yes, it's a bit easier, but non-power steering is hardly that 
difficult", and then if you ever go back to driving an older car you 
think "bloody hell this is hard work".

:)

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> Interesting. My PC monitor doesn't go that high. (!)
>
> Must take some serious MPEG compression to fit that onto a disk - even a 
> bluray disk has only finite storage capacity.

50 GB max IIRC.

>>> (I remember I once plugged my laptop into the TV because we didn't own a 
>>> DVD player. The Windows desktop was... unreadable.)
>>
>> If you buy a 1080p TV though, that means that it is 1920x1080 resolution. 
>> If you plug your PC into it (either by DVI->HDMI or analog VGA) and set 
>> your PC to a 1920x1080 screen mode it will look perfect.
>
> My laptop doesn't go that high. ;-)

You mean the VGA output or the LCD?  If you connected the external output to 
a LCD that was capable of 1920x1080 then it might work.

> (Also, it has only VGA and S-Video output. I managed to find an S-Video to 
> SCART converter, which allows me to connect to the TV.)

Yuk :-) you need VGA, component or DVI/HDMI for HD resolutions...

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