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Disappointed with HD TV (I think)
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I'm with you. I'll be one of the last people to upgrade to an HDTV. Both my brother and my dad have it, and whenever I go to either of there houses I am thoroughly unimpressed by it. Yes, they have it set up correctly. I just couldn't even begin to care about better looking TV. I'm perfectly happy with SD, and have zero complaints with the quality of the picture.
That list is a little depressing. Time-Warner is giving us almost none of these HD stations.
I watched that last night (very good special btw) and I was wondering the same. It looked pretty damn good. But if it was on film, which is a higher resolution than any HDTV out there, I guess that's how they could get it in HD
That blows. I get most of those through Charter.
I have yet to figure out the purpose of The Weather Channel in HD. That has to be the biggest waste of bandwidth ever. First of all, every time I turn to it, it's 4:3 with the bars on the side. Second, do I really need to see a radar map in high def? I wish Charter would dump TWC HD and replace it with something that actually shows stuff that would benefit from the higher resolution
It would probably also have to have been artfully cropped, since the source material is probably film shot in 4:3. A lot of documentaries use this technique now.
Also, some of the cameras back in the day were able to capture the video in another ratio, say 1:66 as opposed to 4:3, it was then cropped down for tv when broadcasted. If they have the original film, the are probably mastering it from that. Also I remember reading somewhere, I will try to find the article, that some of the cameras also shot at a higher resolution then tv was able to handle back in the day. Once again if they have the original tape. Remaster it. Of course it won't look as good as HD shot in HD, but it will pretty good.
Almost the same as upconverting dvd players. You have a dvd with 480-520 lines of resolution and you are pushing it to 720-1080 lines of resolution, will it look just as good as HD ehhhh probably not but it will look good non the less.
Yeah, there's still no comparison between upconverted DVD and real HD.
I watched 300 when it was on HBO HD in 1080i, and despite Charter compressing the hell out of it, it still looks better than any upconverted DVD I've ever seen. The sharpness and detail you get with real HD simply can't be reproduced by upconversion.
Got my 40" 1080p Samsung hooked up in the bedroom this weekend. I'm still waiting for my HDMI cable to come from Amazon, then I'll hook up the PS3 properly. How lame that a Blu-Ray and HD games machine ships with composite - not even component, much less HDMI. I'd gladly swap the pack-in composite cable and useless ethernet cable for a 4' HDMI, Sony.
Once that's done, we'll decide whether to bother upgrading from digital cable to HD for the extra $6/month. In the meantime, 480i still looks far better on this TV than it ever did on the old POS 4:3 19" non-flat CRT set we had.
Once that's done, we'll decide whether to bother upgrading from digital cable to HD for the extra $6/month. In the meantime, 480i still looks far better on this TV than it ever did on the old POS 4:3 19" non-flat CRT set we had.
The difference between SD and HD over cable is night and day. I'm paying an extra 8 bucks a month for it and it's well worth it
Question for you guys, when watching SD content, do you watch it in 4:3 with the bars on the side, or stretched to 16:9?
Sidebars. The stretching is horrible. I have friends who watch everything stretched, and it makes me crazy.
I find it nauseating. Even worse when it's a really large TV, like 60", and they watch it from ten feet away.
Yeah, I picked up my HD cable box earlier this week, but there's something wrong with it - HDMI won't work, only component [not my cables or TV inputs - every combination of my 2 cables and 3 TV inputs works perfectly fine with my PS3]. They didn't have another box in stock that I could swap for, but they're sending a tech over on Saturday to replace it.
Comcast doesn't have a huge selection of worthwhile HD channels, but just watching baseball in HD is worth the extra $8/month. Friggin' Sweet!
Okay, this is really pissing me off. I'm watching the baseball game on Fox right now, which I'm 99.9% sure is supposed to be in HD. But our local station has decided that because there might be a storm brewing in bumf**k nowhere, they're going to replace their HD broadcast with the SD game with the weather bug overlayed, so now, on our HD Fox channel, I'm getting letterboxed, SD crap. Is this standard operating procedure for affiliates or something?
I haven't seen this particular stupid network trick, but I have seen them squeeze HD broadcasts vertically to add in a scoreboard ticker on the bottom. They could crop the picture a little down there or even display the ticker transparently, but no, they distort the picture. Do these people even have brains?
Well, about 30 minutes ago, they finally switched to the HD broadcast. But then they just did the dumbest damn thing I've ever seen. They switched it back to the SD broadcast while they overlayed a message about the DTV conversion. Uh, hello? I'm watching the digital channel already, obviously, I'm not going to be affected by the DTV switch! Not to mention that this wasn't OTA, but off of cable, so even if I don't have a DTV tuner, I'm still not going to be affected. And they haven't switched back to the HD version again even though the overlay is gone
I hope by the conversion, the FCC puts rules in place stating that local affiliates cannot do anything to mess with the HD broadcast, and if they're going to overlay anything, they overlay on the HD feed, not an upconverted SD feed.
Amazing, isn't it? The broadcasters don't seem to care about broadcast quality even a little. I wouldn't count on the FCC to do anything about it, though the content producers might if it gets bad enough.
Agreed. Especially sports - all of them! I couldn't watch hockey or golf on SD but HD you can really follow the puck and ball. DiscoveryHD is breathtaking.
Only problem I had is when I bought a 40" and found it wasn't big enough for SD use without distorting pic so I took it back and got a 46" which does pretty good even with sidebars.
Now, I don't know how much of the actual content is in 1080i, I think some of the HD stuff is 720 that's been upconverted. And you can tell the SD stuff that's being upconverted to 1080i since that looks like crap. My TiVo says what the resolution is in the program guide data, but it's not accurate (for example, it lists the local news as being 1080i on the analog channel and 480i on the HD channel)
....
I think someone brought up the point that all broadcasts should be in HD (720 or above). Obviously not possible for stuff that's been filmed in 480. Of course there's the left and right column thing, but the stuff in the middle is still standard def and looks like crap
I'm all for eventually requiring all new content to be recorded in HD (which I think is inevitable anyways, since cameras are going to be HD-only soon I bet). The FCC required everyone to move to digital, we might as well make the networks take advantage of it.
You're right. Stations upconvert SD programming to broadcast in HD. i.e. FOX always broadcasts at 1080i. Some of the programming is recorded natively at that resolution (or some other HD resolution) but older shows, like Seinfeld, still broadcast at 1080i...even though the actual source tape is only 480i....it's upcoverted to 1080i. The Fox signal always broadcasts at 1080i.
Yeah, I'm not counting on it either. As long as pop stars who are past their prime flash their nipple for a split second at the Super Bowl, the FCC has much bigger things to worry about
I don't know what the content producers can do though. They can just make demands, but even those are futile if they don't have a way to punish affiliates who still do that crap. They can't pull their content from the affiliate? Then they lose even more viewers.
I sent an e-mail to the Fox affiliate from their website with my complaints, not that I think they'll actually care. Maybe with enough complaints, they'll get the hint. But even then, they know I don't have much of a choice. If I want to watch the ballgame, where else am I going to go?
Our CBS and NBC affiliates can overlay weather and DTV notices without replacing the HD feed with the SD feed, I don't know why the Fox one can't. Obviously, the technology is there, it's just a matter of being too cheap, too lazy, too stupid, or a combination of the three.
Like all businesses the b'casters care about making money and they can make more money selling ad time on 5 super compressed HD channels than on 1 nice looking HD channel. Until that changes I don't see their SOP changing either. As for content producers... well many times the content producers and the b'casters are owned by the same mega-conglomerate and I don't see "big boys" like Lucas or Spielberg raising a stink because they want people to come to the theaters and watch movies not sit at home watching TV. The chasm between what viewers see on TV and what the pros see while making the content has always been there and probably always will.
If an "independent" HD provider shows up again and gains traction offering quality over quality then that might force the other guys to up their game too, but I don't see that happening. Customers will settle for "good enough" quality as long as the tech is convenient (cell phones, mp3 players, downloadable movies/tv shows, youtube, etc.,).
FOX & ABC went 720p while CBS and NBC went 1080i.
Lethal