Slashdot Mirror
The First High-Definition TV, Circa 1958
An anonymous reader sends us to Gizmag for a look at a recent auction of a large collection of antique TVs. The star of the show was the Teleavia type P111, one of the earliest examples of high-definition TV. This rare 1958 console-stand television was designed by Flaminio Bertroni, who was also responsible for the iconic Citroen DS. The TV featured dual resolution capability, with the higher setting offering better resolution than 720p — 819 lines. This early attempt at a high-def standard, originating in France in 1949, didn't catch on in the marketplace.
The Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first working television system was talking of a 1000 lines too in the1940's. :) ;)
Nothing new, just a young person thinking wow they could do that back then
The revolution was the sweat shops of Asia and quality control.
Digital HD was a rush, needing real skill. A duct tape effort
http://www.bairdtelevision.com/colour.html
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
As much as I love my 22" widescreen LCD monitor, I still miss the crisp, solid, and reliable CRT. This article is a prime example of why we have used CRT's for such a long time. But what I want to know is, why hasn't anyone mass produced a Thin CRT yet? I'm sure all of you remember the articles posted back in 2004 about Samsung developing a Thin CRT. What the hell happened and why did this idea fall through?
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
One of the biggest factors to the glacial pace of desktop display resolution this decade may be web standards.
A sudden jump in DPI just doesn't isn't practical for the pixel-for-pixel nature of the web (however much the W3C may try to change that). Sure, newer browsers will scale entire layouts to higher resolutions, but the image quality and often layout integrity lose a lot in the process. So, display manufacturers have kept everything in the 72-96 dpi range so that everything looks more or less the same.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Obviously the movie studios were afraid of having their content available to consumers in such high resolutions!
But for all I know, that may not be entirely a joke.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I wouldn't doubt that (you can certainly fit a feature film's worth of 1080p on a dual layer DVD, but copyright holders waited for a more DRM-infected format), but I think bandwidth would have been the bigger issue. Lord knows they didn't have digital compression back then, never mind a decent implementation like h.264. I don't know a damn thing about analog compression, but I imagine that it's all inherently lossy so applying much would defeat the purpose of having the increased resolution in the first place.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
As a frequent pirate of movies, let me just say: 8-9GB for a 1080p movie (in h.264) is not sufficient to make compression artifacts non-noticeable on any decent display. And I've yet to find a codec that is better than h.264.
Here in Norway the outdatedness of TV is taken to a whole other level. Over here, you can't even own a TV (or anything else with a TV tuner) without paying about $456 a year in "broadcast tax" (loosely translated)! Even if you only use your TV with your media PC, you still have to pay this broadcast tax, even though there is no actual broadcasting going on, Hell, you have a TV in your basement? What you say !! Pay up, biatch! =(
Here in Finland they've really noticed the outdatedness (mainly from people canceling their subscriptions to the "TV fee"), and starting from 2012 they're going to charge about $250 or more per household, TV or no TV present.
They aren't?
Way ahead of it's time, as well. What a ride!
When asked about the 2CVs performance and acceleration, many owners said it went "from 0-60 in one day". Others jokingly said they "had to make an appointment to merge onto an interstate highway system".
Yep, a heck of a ride ...
I was once driven around Strasbourg in a 2CV, on a route that involved going up and down kerbs, steps, pedestrian areas and gardens (don't ask). I can honestly say that it did things that would be impossible in most modern cars, and much more smoothly than a 4x4. I remember bracing myself for the bump I expected when we approached a kerb at 20 mph, and none came - the ultra spongy suspension just took the impact and the car raise up slowly. The same soft suspension made the car lean on every bend in a most disconcerting way though.
Have you tried that on video that wasn't horribly compressed to begin with?
DS != 2CV.
The DS was a luxury car, I think De Gaulle used one, with a hydraulic suspension, you could make the care go higher or lower on its wheeels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroen_DS
The 2CV was a very cheap, noisy, reliable and easy to maintain people's car. It set some kind of record, with 40+ years in production. I had one for a while, I remember trying to go as fast as possible when going downhill, so that I wouldn't slow down to 10 mph before I reached the top of the next hill. Felt kinda like a bike. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroen_2cv. The one in their picture looks classy in black. Mine was bright yellow, with duck stickers all over
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.