Slashdot Mirror
DVD Players - Buy Now or Wait for the Violet Laser Models?
PateraSilk asks: "I've been resisting the DVD pull for a while but VHS is becoming more and more obselete. So, I'm thinking about joining the hordes, but I have two problems with the DVD format: compression artifacts and low-level pixel dithering, which annoy me no end. Maybe I've just seen crappy DVDs, but this leads me to my question: should I go ahead and purchase a DVD player regardless of my qualms or wait for a violet/blue laser standard to emerge? My hope is that a larger storage capacity would lead to a less lossy compression format, but, then again, I could be waiting in vain. Plus, I don't want to embrace a technology only to have it be replaced within a couple of years." Remember, Sony's violet-laser player has already hit the market, so hopefully it won't be long before other manufacturers follow suit. How long will it be before competition in this market drives down prices to reasonable levels?
Blah blah blah. What you failed to "educate" with your babble is that hi-fi speakers aren't going to reproduce any "beyond-hearing harmonics" so it's completely irrelevant if they exist or not.
Also if the "interferences" truly created noise in the audible frequency range then they will be recorded in the studio. So the hi-fi equipment will record and reproduce the "interferences" just fine.
Of course, I did know that you are speaking a load of crap. Yes, harmonics are real. No, your explanation of tone is completely wrong. And this gem of a sentence:
Takes the cake for Biggest Load of Audiophile Bullshit that I've ever had the displeasure to read. It's a string of buzzwords with no actual meaning. There's a grain of truth in there because audio is altered by reflection off surfaces, but it has nothing to do with "modulation" nor do the waves "affect each other".
Isn't it amazing how mysticism pervades every facet of our lives. From medicine (natural "healing") to music (audiophiles *puke*). I was particularly appalled at a recent story on the news where a cancer patient refused to take chemotherapy treatment, instead opting for traditional Greek remedies such as boiled tea leaves and bat-shit. When the cancer victim inevitably died after 3 years, the family blamed the hospitals and the government! I'm similarly appalled by audiophiles who enjoy the fruits of labour from actual audio engineers, yet invent these techno-babble BULLSHIT beliefs to surround it. It's mysticism in another form.
Just like vinyl sounds better to an audiophile's ears than a CD, videotape just looks better to a videophiles eyes than a DVD.
Speaking as a videophile, I have to disagree.
The analog encoding on VHS loses high-frequency information way too fast. (See this comparison for the sillyscope pics. It's comparing SVHS to VHS, but you can see how they all lose HF info.) Signal bleed and stretch kick in a week after you buy the tape. Moire (colors appearing in a black and white pattern) and susceptibility to poor combing (losing edges around 3.5 MHz) is inescapable, because the chroma signal is still overlaid on the intensity signal. (This last sentence applies if you hook up the DVD player with a composite cable, but I'm concentrating on VHS format problems, not connection follies.)
I know people who prefer laserdisc, which is an analog format, to DVD. It suffers from some of the problems as VHS (such as moire), but it does have a much higher bandwidth than VHS, meaning better resolution-- a sharper picture and clearer detail.
These laserdisc holdouts are a dwindling breed, though. The DVD revolution has taken hold.
So videophiles don't prefer VHS. What's PateraSilk's deal? I'm guessing he saw bad examples: poor transfers, possibly, or a bad (or misconfigured) player adding stairsteps when it downconverted a 16:9 tape. (See my other post in this article.) But I can't imagine anybody prefering VHS to DVD in general.
If you look very closely...it's not as good at all...it blurs things...reducing the detail, and has more artifacts. There was an article here at slashdot a couple months ago that compared video compression. It doesn't look as good at all. Especially on scenes with a lot of detail, and a lot of difference between the adjecent frames (like during camera movement), which are the ones that make the codec really matter.
One of my co-workers came in to work last year and proclaimed that digital cable was no better than regular cable. Everyone who had DC at the time looked at him cockeyed and were like, "WTF?!?!?"
It turns out he had it hooked up to the tv with the COAX. I told him to go back home and hook it up with the composite cables.
(I would've told him S-VIDEO BUT THERE ISN'T A F***ING S-VIDEO JACK ON THE DIGITAL CABLE BOXES THAT AT&T DISTRIBUTED IN MY AREA!) WHY??? WHY??? WHY???
Anyway, he came back the next day and thanked us profusely for showing him the way.
I know there are a few of the Motorola Digital Cable boxes in the Boston Area that have the S-Video out and they're attached to old Black and White TVs that only have RF Modulation.
--Mike