732: HDTV
| HDTV |
 Title text: We're also stuck with blurry, juddery, slow-panning 24fps movies forever because (thanks to 60fps home video) people associate high framerates with camcorders and cheap sitcoms, and thus think good framerates look fake. |
Explanation
This comic pokes fun at the differing standard between image quality for television sets and electronic devices, even though both standard are based on essentially the same standards. When rating television sets, a 1080p screen, that is, a screen 1080 pixels tall with progressive scan, is considered impressive. In contrast, the same resolution with a computer device is considered standard fare, given that a computer screen 1,024 pixels wide is expected, though computer screens can reach 1,366 pixels.
The title texts explains another disparagement involving images and popular opinion. The feeling that a viewer gets from watching a film in a theatre is different from the feeling from a home film, or again, between a serialized programme from an international television channel and a locally-broadcast programme. The disparity is that the small-time productions actually implement better-quality equipment than the big-time productions. The problem is that public opinion associates the better-quality equipment with the less ambitious films (while being lower quality in other areas, for example, plot) due to the proliferation of the less-ambitious films, yet public opinions associates the worse-quality equipment with the more ambitious films due to they not only being of a wider reach than the less-ambitious films but also (probably) due to the more-ambitious films using the same equipment for decades (possibly to cut costs). This focus on public opinion cased the more-ambitious films to keep using worse-quality equipment in order to avoid the stigma public opinion has with better-quality equipment. (This is changing, however, since the films The Hobbit and Avatar 2 are going to be shot with better framerates, though, at the time that this explanation is written, the effects have yet to be seen...)
Transcript
- One person is pointing to a huge flatscreen HDTV on the wall. The other is holding a cell phone.
- HDTV Owner: Check out my new HDTV--a beautiful, high-def 1080p.
- Friend: Wow, that's over TWICE the horizontal resolution of my cell phone.
- Friend: In fact, it almost beats the LCD monitor I got in 2004.
- It baffles me that people find HDTV impressive.
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But it's on a bigger screen. Jokes aside, I believe TVs are more impressive because the refresh rate is higher and the TV needs more circuitry on the back-end to handle the physically larger screen and the multiple possible inputs. I may be wrong. Davidy22[talk] 13:25, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
The commentary about computer screen sizes needs to be dated and/or updated, as it's clearly outdated. 108.162.212.196 17:17, 11 January 2014 (UTC)
- I don't think that's the case. TV's rely on standards, think of blu-ray, dvd, VHS, DVB-C (cable). A change in media format would require users to buy a new hardware, people are likely not willing to buy new equipment every two years.
- For computers it's different. The video output is generated and not played back. Computers are more flexible and if a format is not supported a simple update can fix everything. Necessaryevil (talk) 15:25, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
