Scary televisions
Dec. 26th, 2002 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynNothing new on tv to review! Bah! Humbug!
So, I'm probably going to lose my job sometime early in the new year. The big joke is that our main client wanted us to stay there for her account, after our boss left to go to a competing business, and we got promised rentention bonuses if we stayed. Then she took all her work to our ex-boss. Ha ha! So funny, it makes you want to cry. But we still got our little teeny retention bonuses, and I decided, why save for unemployment and destitution and penury when I can buy new electronic gadgets and set myself up for the digital revolution? Considering how much tv and dvd I watch, it seemed like a logical choice.
But HDTV is scary! I didn't have enough $$ to buy a fully HD box (cuz like, they're five freaking thousand dollars), but instead one of the HD-ready ones that require a set top converter box to pick up the HD broadcast signals. It creates an interesting effect, I have to say -- the closest word I can come up with is sparkly (it's like popslash fandom!) -- images are of course pixels rather than interlaced lines on a screen, so when you watch a typical NTSC signal or videotape, the pixels shift and sort of... sparkle around. It makes things look a bit blurry in some ways -- basically it's like looking at images on your computer screen when they're blown up larger than the compression format would allow -- not bad, but not perfectly crisp, either. I just felt that the converter boxes were absurdly expensive at this point, so want to wait until they come down in price and are more of a necessity than an extra. This will make my regular viewing and my tapes, even SVHS, look pretty disappointing, but it seems as if there's no middle ground.
These things are designed for the digital medium. Until I can get an affordably priced, format-convenient recordable dvd machine, anything less than pure digital is going to be second-rate. In some cases, like watching my song vid tapes, it almost makes me want to cry, because things look so damn bad. A recent Spike/Buffy vid I made, with its almost completely dark scenes, looks like someone threw glitter all over it, with the white dropouts and signal loss. They're not forigiving of the traditional mediums at all. I was two clips away from finishing my Firefly vid when they delivered the tv, and when I went back to put them in, it was alarming having this huge monitor-like screen in front of my head, blurring and sparkling. I realized I'd stepped into some really new territory.
But for the movie/dvd loving side of me, I'm in hog heaven. Everything that the tv side of me suffers for is completely obliterated in the digital side: the picture is astonishing, the sound incredible, and the features for viewing just fantastic (I can choose to "grade" the picture with four separate tonal qualities -- if you watched the supplementary material on the extended Fellowship of the Ring discs, you'd have seen some info about grading there). The vibrancy of the colors is actually sort of disturbing in both tv and dvd mode -- my eye is simply not used to having colors rendered so vibrantly and vividly with little bleedthrough from one to the other, and I keep trying to tone it down too much. Watching Brotherhood of the Wolf, I kept trying to tone down the reds of the riding coats, but then I'd lose the greens of the scenery and the blues of the other clothing -- each color is rendered so completely that it seems unnatural, especially after tvs that smear colors.
My sister, bless her soul, gave me Band of Brothers for Christmas, and this was really where I thought I'd given myself the best possible present. BoB was created in high definition, so it's a perfect marriage of these two things. The picture is so crisp, so perfect, that it actually made me speechless when I tried to talk about it to a friend -- all I could do was point at the screen. I'm over halfway through, having just finished watching Bastogne, and each time I watch a disc, I still just boggle at the intensity of the picture, at its perfection. You can count every freckle on Damian Lewis's (Winters) face, every beard follicle on Nixon's chin (and can I just say how much I adore them together? I feel weirdly RPS here, but they're so wonderful!). There's no digitizing in the picture, no pixelization or loss or smearing during fast motion. It's as close to what a human being really sees as I can imagine getting.
It's definitely a cool toy and I love the smell of new electronics in the morning. But one half of my life as a fan will definitely suffer (the tv half, the tape half), even as the other sits there going, whoa, cool! I'm glad I bought it, but it will probably be a long while before that tv half gets a picture it feels satisfied with, especially since my other half knows just how good it can be.ˇ
So, I'm probably going to lose my job sometime early in the new year. The big joke is that our main client wanted us to stay there for her account, after our boss left to go to a competing business, and we got promised rentention bonuses if we stayed. Then she took all her work to our ex-boss. Ha ha! So funny, it makes you want to cry. But we still got our little teeny retention bonuses, and I decided, why save for unemployment and destitution and penury when I can buy new electronic gadgets and set myself up for the digital revolution? Considering how much tv and dvd I watch, it seemed like a logical choice.
But HDTV is scary! I didn't have enough $$ to buy a fully HD box (cuz like, they're five freaking thousand dollars), but instead one of the HD-ready ones that require a set top converter box to pick up the HD broadcast signals. It creates an interesting effect, I have to say -- the closest word I can come up with is sparkly (it's like popslash fandom!) -- images are of course pixels rather than interlaced lines on a screen, so when you watch a typical NTSC signal or videotape, the pixels shift and sort of... sparkle around. It makes things look a bit blurry in some ways -- basically it's like looking at images on your computer screen when they're blown up larger than the compression format would allow -- not bad, but not perfectly crisp, either. I just felt that the converter boxes were absurdly expensive at this point, so want to wait until they come down in price and are more of a necessity than an extra. This will make my regular viewing and my tapes, even SVHS, look pretty disappointing, but it seems as if there's no middle ground.
These things are designed for the digital medium. Until I can get an affordably priced, format-convenient recordable dvd machine, anything less than pure digital is going to be second-rate. In some cases, like watching my song vid tapes, it almost makes me want to cry, because things look so damn bad. A recent Spike/Buffy vid I made, with its almost completely dark scenes, looks like someone threw glitter all over it, with the white dropouts and signal loss. They're not forigiving of the traditional mediums at all. I was two clips away from finishing my Firefly vid when they delivered the tv, and when I went back to put them in, it was alarming having this huge monitor-like screen in front of my head, blurring and sparkling. I realized I'd stepped into some really new territory.
But for the movie/dvd loving side of me, I'm in hog heaven. Everything that the tv side of me suffers for is completely obliterated in the digital side: the picture is astonishing, the sound incredible, and the features for viewing just fantastic (I can choose to "grade" the picture with four separate tonal qualities -- if you watched the supplementary material on the extended Fellowship of the Ring discs, you'd have seen some info about grading there). The vibrancy of the colors is actually sort of disturbing in both tv and dvd mode -- my eye is simply not used to having colors rendered so vibrantly and vividly with little bleedthrough from one to the other, and I keep trying to tone it down too much. Watching Brotherhood of the Wolf, I kept trying to tone down the reds of the riding coats, but then I'd lose the greens of the scenery and the blues of the other clothing -- each color is rendered so completely that it seems unnatural, especially after tvs that smear colors.
My sister, bless her soul, gave me Band of Brothers for Christmas, and this was really where I thought I'd given myself the best possible present. BoB was created in high definition, so it's a perfect marriage of these two things. The picture is so crisp, so perfect, that it actually made me speechless when I tried to talk about it to a friend -- all I could do was point at the screen. I'm over halfway through, having just finished watching Bastogne, and each time I watch a disc, I still just boggle at the intensity of the picture, at its perfection. You can count every freckle on Damian Lewis's (Winters) face, every beard follicle on Nixon's chin (and can I just say how much I adore them together? I feel weirdly RPS here, but they're so wonderful!). There's no digitizing in the picture, no pixelization or loss or smearing during fast motion. It's as close to what a human being really sees as I can imagine getting.
It's definitely a cool toy and I love the smell of new electronics in the morning. But one half of my life as a fan will definitely suffer (the tv half, the tape half), even as the other sits there going, whoa, cool! I'm glad I bought it, but it will probably be a long while before that tv half gets a picture it feels satisfied with, especially since my other half knows just how good it can be.ˇ
