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September 18, 2008 at 21:42:13
by Rady Ananda Page 1 of 1 page(s) |
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By February 2009, television is going totally digital. In preparation for this, my dear old dad bought a high definition television - HDTV. Granted, only a few stations come in HDTV, but there is a harsh, stark difference from regular television. The hype is that the picture and sound are a lot better. If you think people with glowing eyes, teeth and grey hair is better than the fuzzy, more muted version, then HDTV is for you. The picture is unreal, overly vivid, and the colors scream louder than AC-DC. Oh sure, we can read the text a lot better - and that is its only improvement, imo. But when you look around your living room and then at the HDTV, it's as if Walt Disney, Andy Warhol and Timothy Leary took an acid trip to the sun. The colors radiate, irritate, and distract from the film. It's like permanently watching TV in phosphorescence. It sucks. The intensity of the colors makes the picture vivid from 50 feet away. I kid you not. How can this possibly be anything but harmful to our eyes? I'm thinking we might benefit by putting a black screen over the 67-inch HDTV - it'll mute the colors to a more realistic hue. 
I mean, I like red fine. But I like mauve, too. I like the muted colors of the Painted Desert. And while the ocean's sparkling waves on a bright sunny day are pretty, they have nothing on the misty verdent variations of a mature rainforest.
Don't be the first on your block to buy HDTV. Wait until they fix the color intensity.
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| 21 comments |
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Are you kidding?
HDTV is not High "density" TV. Im sure you were being sarcastic. Televisons are set with over ripe settings to attract buyers in stores. So it becomes the brighter the better. Fortunately this can be rectified with user settings or even professional recalibration if you really want to get that movie film effect. The higher resolution is long overdue. Perhaps you are a bit of a technophobe? by Tommy Megremis (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments) on Thursday, Sep 18, 2008 at 10:29:49 PM  (0+)
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Reply: rude dude
Wiki: High-definition television (HDTV) is a digital television broadcasting system with higher resolution than traditional television systems (standard-definition TV, or SDTV). HDTV is digitally broadcast because digital television (DTV) requires less bandwidth if sufficient video compression is used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television. I looked it up before typing and then still wrote the wrong word. thanks for the correction. well, we had a pro over today and still the colors scream. and honestly, are you going to attack the messenger instead of the message? do you honestly believe a technophobe would blog? by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Thursday, Sep 18, 2008 at 10:36:51 PM (0+)
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Deaf to Hi-Def
And I thought that I was the only person on this planet not taken in by HI-DEFmania. I have a fine, nineteen inch, stereo television that I payed twenty dollars for in a garage sale five years ago (solid black). Why the hell would I want to pay two grand for a TV when I already have one that works beautifully? One thing you forgot to mention, Rady, is the fact that the only way to watch HDTV is by sitting directly in front of it. Did you ever try to watch it from the side? The picture gets all fuzzy and distorted. Here's another thing to take nto consideration: People are junking their old, analogue TV sets by the millions! What we have here is a genuine environmental nightmare. We have to find other uses for those sets. (They're made with radio-active materials) Quite frankly, between you and me and the lamp post, I plan on sticking with my RCA until the day it up and dies. Then - and only then - will I even consider HI-DEF. On that happy note.... Tom Degan by Tom Degan (23 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 45 comments) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 8:38:00 AM (0+)
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Reply: trash heap
ooh, that's such a good point, Tom. And then my brain goes to over-population being the source of most of our problems... btw, this particular brand does allow for a clear view from the side... and I learned my dear old dad LIKES the colors screaming at us, so his wife and I will have to work on him so that we can get the colors adjusted to a more realistic hue. it looks like that techie above was right. damn, I knew I should have posted this as a diary. lol by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 10:11:14 PM (0+)
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second the motion
The only way to get quality pictures is with cable or satellite which also have their problems.I have a supposedy hd antena and the hd picture keeps breaking up until i fiddle arounde with the antena a million times .The picture improvement is not worth the thousand extra dallors to buy an hd tv or to fiddle for hours with an antena.The only reason for these so called improvements are to help the appliance industry and cable tv industries.We now have blu ray supplanting hd dvd's which supplanted regular dvd's which supplanted vhs.Its all a big scam for little or no improvement by liberalsrock (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 256 comments [53 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 9:31:43 AM (0+)
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Reply: the consumer spinning wheel
like hamsters, are we. by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 10:13:05 PM (0+)
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Kill your TV now.
Why would anybody watch the crap on television? Are you unaware that it is used to control your mind? Do you enjoy Hollywood's version of life? Do you accept it as reality? Perhaps that is the problem on this planet. by daveys (9 articles, 0 quicklinks, 22 diaries, 272 comments [20 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 9:59:55 AM (0+)
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Reply: I tried! I tried to "Kill my TV".....
I hate TV. TV is annoying. When I called my cable tv provider to drop TV and just keep internet access I was informed that it would cost me $10 more to drop all TV and just subscribe to the Net. Soo... I now have basic cable TV with internet access. I TRIED..... really I did...... But.... "They" wouldn't let me. They pay me $10/mo to have TV. by Steve Wayne (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 11:27:19 AM (0+)
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Reply: Kill Your TV
but then I couldn't watch Dexter, America's favorite serial killer. hey, I admit TV is one big propaganda machine, and there's gotta be something to its promotion of serial killers (even Kevin Costner played one). But it turns out that Dexter is the one regular show everyone in my house agrees on... so once a week, the family goes out to dinner, takes a walk (maybe), and comes home to watch TV together. Sick? Twisted? of course. I live in the belly of the beast! by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 10:17:16 PM (0+)
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Fred and Barney think it all sucks
I know how this will make me sound, old for one thing, but I don't like the way somebody decides that I want, I need, and I have to have, something like HDTV without checking to see if I agree. Music went from analog to digital without asking me if that was what I wanted. I am not an expert, but my understanding is that in order to digitalize music they had to compress and truncate sounds in the very upper and lower ranges. Therefore people with discerning ears can recognize that digital quality is actually inferior. My own opinion is that it was just too easy to duplicate music and movies with tapes and the recording and hollywood moguls wanted to change this. There is a lot of Grammy winning music that you cannot buy in anything but vinyl format and a lot VHS movies have yet to make the leap to DVD. I am not sure, but I think that you can only get about half of Frank Zappa's music in a digital format and there is even some of Steeley Dan's music that didn't make the leap. I have been using rabbit ears antenae lately because I think that most of television is cheesy and sucks. I mentioned this to co-workers and they were increduous...and unfortunately, it sometimes left us with less to talk about. Television is already a big enough intrusion in most homes......you have to have one room devoted to it and all of the furniture is turned toward it like it is some sort of shrine or something. When the television is on, you can do nothing in that room BUT watch it whether you like the program or not. Reading, hobbies, card or board games are out of the question. You have to go to a different room for those things or watch somebody else do them on TV. The times where I really get into watching TV are when I am sick and I am too stupid or punchy to do anything else. I am going to do my best not to make this "Great Leap Forward" and stick to the old format if I can. In the end I probably won't be successful. I already have a flat screen, a CRT, VCR, DVD, CD player, tape player, vinyl player, not to mention Wii (I don't like it), computer and internet connection. And friends and co workers still thought I was a Luddite because I didn't have cable or satellite. by vidiot (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 300 comments [10 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:12:02 PM (0+)
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Reply: TV for the sick
well, when I'm sick, I like to snooze in silence... but I gotta admit, every other wknd or so, I like to capture the TV for about 6 hours and just watch movies... fall asleep to them. by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 10:30:40 PM (0+)
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Are you kidding?
What did you look at when you wrote that? Evidently, on a PC monitor. Currently a modest monitor is 1400x1050, while full HD is 1080p. If there are no problems with the monitor, then there are no problems with TV. by Andrey Gerasimenko (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 31 comments [1 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 6:43:40 PM (0+)
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Reply: trash heap
yep, see my comment above with same subject line.... we will adjust the colors.... once we wear away my pater's resolve. by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 10:22:09 PM (0+)
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reproduction: program quality inversely proportional
Like when they came out with CD's but the best music was on vinyl, and we heard the greatest hits on our tinny AM transistors. When we only had b&w, but it seemed more colorful. Like when plays were done on stage. Nowadays it's all special effects, huge explosions (kinda like 9/11). All the good stories are remakes. Compression spares bandwidth, which costs money. So HDnet uses bandwidth up for gorgeous travelogues, just to draw you in. Then you watch something else, and contours of different brightness or color zones don't move in sync. Fast-moving parts of live sports pictures pixellate. Some programs have images that don't update each frame all at once--the upper part moves ahead of the lower part. I've seen all this on HDTV, and find it very disconcerting. These things cause cognitive dissonance in a way analog TVs couldn't. Any doubt that's all the better to hypnotize the masses? by Clark (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 45 comments [3 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 9:01:05 PM (0+)
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Reply: like the Outer Limits
they control it all... lol I'll watch for the timing differences... that's interesting. This baby is 67 inches, so I'm thinking he bought it with all the bells and whistles. We're likely going to be pleasantly hypnotized once we get pops to mute the colors. by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 10:27:37 PM (0+)
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TV What TV
I find a good book or a good project better then TV any time. Ours only gets use when we run out of books or someone tells us something special is on. Most of the time that gets shut off too, because it's not really that special. I do not plan to upgrade, and I agree, we need to think about what is going to happen to all those old tv's. Mine will problably make it to the junk pile when the conversion comes around. We have a DVD player and a vcr and neither has been used in the last year. Do have a couple of computers that take up too much space for our house, but they do get used. by Robert N Smith (15 articles, 0 quicklinks, 11 diaries, 152 comments [3 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Friday, Sep 19, 2008 at 9:43:18 PM (0+)
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Responsible Journalism?
Your article turned up on a Google News search. The title was quite provocative "HDTV Sucks". No ambiguty there. I expected a thoughtful article perhaps exploring the high degree of digital compression used by some cable carriers or some other well reasoned complaint about HDTV. Rather, what I found was an uninformed rant about a parent's HDTV whose colors were clearly misadjusted. Yet the author, undetoured, concludes her article with this general warning: "Don't be the first on your block to buy HDTV. Wait until they fix the color intensity" Buried deep in the comments section is an admission by the author that she later discovered her Dad's preference was for very vivid colors! What is interesting is that the very first comment posted (by a Mr. Megrenis) tried to set the author straight by pointing out the set was not adjusted correctly. The author responds by calling him a "rude dude" and accuses him of attacking the messenger. Only later do we discover in the comments that the author has discovered her Dad prefences for vivid colors: "we will adjust the colors.... once we wear away my pater's resolve." How can this be called journalism and why does the article even exist? The author sums up her journalism debacle by saying: " it looks like that techie (presumably Mr. Megremis) above was right. damn, I knew I should have posted this as a diary. lol " LOL - Frightening! by bobby stone (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments) on Saturday, Sep 20, 2008 at 10:13:16 AM (0+)
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Reply: oh relax
the first comment was rude because he made an ad hominem attack - calling me technophobic. That's rude, and in fact, it's grounds to have his comment deleted. But since this is a light piece, and I pointed out his rudeness, I decided to let his comment stand. As to the news alert, how you can think a piece entitled "HDTV Sucks" is going to be anything serious escapes reason. Lighten up... it's a light piece, and the HDTV industry has weighed in on it. by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Saturday, Sep 20, 2008 at 2:55:50 PM (0+)
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Analog Lost
The issue is the loss of the analog TV's filling up the landfills. The digital conversion eliminates analog as a broadcasting option. Analog will still exist, but what good is it, without analog receivers? Digital will soon be the only form of television. What does that mean? Just something about which to think. by Drew Terry (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 28 diaries, 125 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Sep 21, 2008 at 2:27:57 AM (0+)
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neo-Luddites, welcome to digital television!
This is nothing more than a neo-Luddit rant. Analog to digital transmissions are nothing more than a technological progression. The picture received by a digitial transmission is far better than analog. Remeber the days of analog cell phones and their cutting out? Does anyone complain about the move to digital cell phone transmissions? I didn't think so. Provided you purchase a convertor for a minimal fee, you'll still be able to see you analog show in digital with analog quality (480 interlaced lines of resolution) called SDTV. You don't need to purchase an HDTV (1,080 lines of resolution) or even an EDTV. Personally, I'll take HDTV over digitial or analog anyday. To claim that HDTV colors are garish or absurd is to limit your experience. by Tom Murphy (3 articles, 5 quicklinks, 16 diaries, 2100 comments [55 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Sep 21, 2008 at 7:17:07 PM (0+)
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Funnelling customers to cable and satellite companies
As far as I am concerned, most of what's on the telly is crapola; this whole thing ins a sensory addictive proccess to drive people to cable or satellite. You'll notice the ads which say you don't have to do anything if u have cable. Nice racket, eh, forcing people to buy new tvs, get cable or satellite or purchase a demon box translator <LOL> by M. Davis (63 articles, 3 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 221 comments [4 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Sep 21, 2008 at 7:19:53 PM (0+)
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