: 4bd58d26@news.povray.org...
>  Well, I'm not saying you are one of those people (and I'm in fact
> assuming you aren't), but I have seen *way* too many people who vehemently
> deny seeing *anything* wrong *at all* in a 4:3 picture which has been
> stretched horizontally to cover the entire 16:9 screen area.

Truly, lots of people are blind to wrong image ratios. Some years ago the 
photos in my university's facebook had been stretched horizontally, turning 
hundreds of students into flattened toads. Nobody found that odd. Recently, 
I saw a framed print of a painting where the image had been squeezed because 
the original image's ratio was wider than the frame's ratio. Why bother to 
crop the image or find the right frame? Making movies in widescreen is a 
real waste: filmmakers could film everything in 1.37:1 as in the old times, 
stretch them to 2.39:1 and few people would notice.

G.

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> Truly, lots of people are blind to wrong image ratios. Some years ago the 
> photos in my university's facebook had been stretched horizontally, 
> turning hundreds of students into flattened toads. Nobody found that odd. 
> Recently, I saw a framed print of a painting where the image had been 
> squeezed because the original image's ratio was wider than the frame's 
> ratio. Why bother to crop the image or find the right frame? Making movies 
> in widescreen is a real waste: filmmakers could film everything in 1.37:1 
> as in the old times, stretch them to 2.39:1 and few people would notice.

I think it's because we are used to often seeing things at an angle during 
everyday life, so our brain is quite good at automatically correcting aspect 
ratios for us.

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>> I can see the pixels on my monitor.
> 
> What dpi is it?  How far away are you from it?

No idea what the dpi rating is. It's 1400x900 and it's probably about 
30cm tall or something? And I'm sitting maybr 40cm or so away from it. 
(I don't have anything to actually measure it with.)

> My laptop has a 150 dpi screen.  My desktop monitor is 103 dpi and from 
> normal viewing at my desk (60 cm) I cannot see any jagged edges from the 
> pixels (maybe that's just because of the AA settings though).

Yeah, AA hides a multitude of sins. ;-) Curiosly, they don't seem to 
have invented AA for mouse pointers yet. (Except in computer games...)

> Maybe the 
> fact that Windows is not good at scaling has meant that making a 150 or 
> 200 dpi monitor that is used from "desktop" viewing distances would be 
> impossible to use due to the tiny physical size of the fonts and other 
> GUI items?

Plausible.

> I was running it for a while on my laptop with a non-standard dpi 
> setting. On the whole Windows and Office was fine, but IIRC my CAD 
> software screwed up, with some buttons being shifted outside of the 
> window so you couldn't get to them!

Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the 
whole PC, by a mile... ;-)

>> (Then again, my grandparents use FreeSat. Their TV physically has a 
>> 4:3 aspect [it's an old CRT], and the picture seems to fit natively, 
>> so...)
> 
> Most stand alone sat/freeview boxes I've seen have an option to output 
> to 4:3 which just crops the left/right edges of the 16:9 signal (I 
> assume if it's built into a TV it will be set accordingly to match the 
> TV).  This is why they always put any important information in the 
> central part of the screen, as they know some people are still chopping 
> the sides off to watch 4:3.

Maybe that's it then. Maybe the reason I still see all broadcast signals 
in 4:3 aspect is because the receiver is resizing them?

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> Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the 
> whole PC, by a mile... ;-)

Yeh, I think it is about 10x the price of the laptop itself :-)

> Maybe that's it then. Maybe the reason I still see all broadcast signals 
> in 4:3 aspect is because the receiver is resizing them?

I would definitely check the settings on the receiver.

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>> Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the 
>> whole PC, by a mile... ;-)
> 
> Yeh, I think it is about 10x the price of the laptop itself :-)

Only 10x? Bargin!


that *I* usually work with...

>> Maybe that's it then. Maybe the reason I still see all broadcast 
>> signals in 4:3 aspect is because the receiver is resizing them?
> 
> I would definitely check the settings on the receiver.

Mkay...

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> Oh, wait - what laptop do you have?

Some HP one, with Intel T9600 CPU and nVidia FX770M, it's quite nifty and 
surprisingly the battery lasts for 4 or 5 hours if you're not doing anything 
particularly CPU or GPU intensive.



I think mine was about 1500 GBP, although I think our IT guy has some scam 
going with the supplier, because his prices always seem to be way more than 
I find them for on other websites ;-)

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scott wrote:
>> Oh, wait - what laptop do you have?
> 
> Some HP one, with Intel T9600 CPU and nVidia FX770M, it's quite nifty 
> and surprisingly the battery lasts for 4 or 5 hours if you're not doing 
> anything particularly CPU or GPU intensive.

Yeah, I'm still quite surprised at how well the batteries on my laptop 
last. It's always been my experience that the battery specs on the 
packet are nonesense and the battery *actually* lasts about 20 minutes. 
But my current laptop _really will_ run for over an hour without needing 
charge.

(And, since it's the first laptop I've seen with a *working* glidepad, 
you can ACTUALLY USE IT ON YOUR LAP! Amazing...)


> 
> I think mine was about 1500 GBP.

I'm glad I was already sitting down. :-)

Man, 10x that... that's expensive! Hell, it's almost worth stealing the 
laptop just for the software that's stored on it! ;-)

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> Man, 10x that... that's expensive! Hell, it's almost worth stealing the 
> laptop just for the software that's stored on it! ;-)

Yeh good luck with that, assuming you managed to get past the hard drive 
encryption somehow, the software won't run without a license.  It picks up 
the license from the network (you can "borrow" it for up to 14 days if you 
want), so you'd either need to hack my VPN account too, or get physical 
access to our site somehow.  Anyway, once we knew it was stolen I'd 
definitely notice if that machine had picked up the license, and then I'd 
ask IT to block it :-)

Easier to just download the software from bitTorrent along with a crack...

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On 4/26/2010 3:19 AM, Invisible wrote:
> I mean, if you're going to force everybody to buy a new TV, new
> receiver, new type of disk and a new machine to play it, why it increase
> the resolution *significantly*? Why only increase it by a small amount?
> I don't understand that.

Partly bandwidth related. The UHF/VHF frequency space has only a certain 
amount of bandwidth per channel. Now, while a HD broadcast in 1080p at 
an "acceptable" compression ratio might fit nicely within the allotted 
bandwidth for a channel, doubling the horizontal and vertical 
resolution, for example quadruples the number of pixels on the screen. 
Eventually, the video would need to be compressed to the point where the 
image would be nothing more than a macroblock-fest.

> (And hell, half the equipment and content that says "HD" on it isn't
> even full resolution anyway... Why allow half a dozen resolutions when
> it would have been far simpler for the designers and less misleading for
> the public if they allow only one resolution?)

We're in a transitional period right now. Give it time. What really irks 
me is the way the cable company has been handling content. They have 
allotted no fewer than 4 channels per local station, which is, IMO 
completely unnecessary, and (if the channels aren't just aliases, and 
some aren't: they're analog variants!) it's a horrible waste of 
bandwidth. I can understand simulcasting the analog variant for those 
who do not have HD equipment, but do not want to rent a box.

> Hell, when I was at uni ten years ago we had computers exceeding these
> resolutions. With Windows NT 4.0, Service Pack 4. Has technology not
> moved on since then? It's not like there's any technical challenge to
> using a higher resolution, after all...

In both the digital flat panel and the CRT's case there is some 
technical challenge to higher resolutions: Eventually the frequencies 
involved get so high that capacitance becomes VERY important, and 
circuit design becomes exceptionally tricky, to the point where traces 
at certain distances from each other (whether on the same layer, or 
overlapped in different layers of the board) will essentially act as a 
low-pass filter killing the signal.

> PS. I am similarly baffled by the current fashion for "widescreen" TVs.
> Given that 99.998% of all video content ever created is in 4:3 aspect,
> what the hell is the advantage of buying a TV with a 16:9 aspect?? I
> don't understand.

Movies.

Going back to why movies went widescreen (they used to be displayed at a 
square ratio, even!) has to do with how the human visual field works, we 
have a wider angle of view on the horizontal axis than we do on the 
vertical.

-- 
~Mike

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On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:19:45 +0100, Invisible wrote:

> Given that 99.998% of all video content ever created is in 4:3 aspect,

Most of what's created today 16:9 or some other widescreen format.  Older 
stuff?  Maybe not "99.998%", but certainly a majority of the content ever 
created by mankind is likely a 4:3 aspect.  Except movies.

> what the hell is the advantage of buying a TV with a 16:9 aspect?? I
> don't understand.

If you watch more modern content, then you can better utilize the space 
for a larger system.  Me, I use my 16:9 projection system mostly for 
watching HDTV and movies, so 99.998% of what I watch is actually 16:9.

Jim

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