Absolutely not. Progressive scan DVDs are of EDTV quality, they have no more real resolution than HDTV. Anamorphic is simply an aspect ratio stretching, with takes exactly the same scan rate to display it. It may look better, but that is because it is simply a more efficient way to put widescreen video into the same 720x480 picture frame.
HD resolutions are considered to be 1080i and 720p. The lesser resolutions are in the ATSC standard, but are not considered HD, simply digital television.
"Tape streaches. It flexes. It gets worn. It gets demagnetized. It tears."
I've never really had problems with tapes, even heavily rented ones. I'm not saying there aren't any problems, I am curious if the danger is overstated.
Well, I bet audiophiles probably run a spectrum rather than be fit into a neat little category. There are smart ones that let their ears do the listening and then there are ones that will pay more simply because they are told that it is better by a salesman or an ad.
I don't think I'm an audiophile, but I generally demand something just a bit better than what Best Buy offers for speakers and the reciever. I ended up getting a speaker set that was the cheapest that the hi-fi store sold, and quite frankly I haven't been let down, either in the listen test or at home.
"You're supposed to watch your movies on a monitor. That's the only way to view progressive scan stuff."
Do you mean the "best" way, or seriously, the "only technically capable" way? For one, computer monitors are pretty dang small, so I would definitely rule it out for parties.
Rear projection HDTVs can do well, and are progressive scan.
Presentation video projectors that have more resolution than an anamorphic DVD can be easily had as well. It works a lot like a computer monitor, generally with the same 15 pin RGB connector. I bought one and I get decent 150" diagonal picture out of it, so I can get more than one or two people to watch a movie at a time.
"Besides which, cars aren't always going to be damaging to the environment. Eventually they'll be electric."
Apparently you haven't considered the fact that the electricity has to come from *somewhere*.
There are claims that humanity's electricity consumption exceeds our ability to use only minimal-impact and renewable sources of energy. Solar systems are hugely inefficent, and there is only so much wind and hydro power that can be effectively tapped.
So, things might come full circle and your electric car would actually be powered by a dirty coal plant. Some of the first experimental cars were directly coal fired.
Also, my VCR has some sort of Commercial Advance treatment where, once the recording was done, it would go back and analyze the video. When it determines that you just hit a commercial, it fast forwards until the main show starts. It gave me ZERO false positives, and it skipped most of the commercials.
The VCR also had a one minute skip.
At any rate, the ads fly by so quickly it's hard to determine what most of them are for.
I've always used a VCR to record shows and then watch later, skiping commercials.
I think the TIVO shows how poorly the VCR makers made their user interfaces. The only other thing that DVRs really have on a VCR are the program guide and the ability to record while watching, as well as pause motion while still recording.
Toothless: There are no penalties for failure to execute. If the mission is not completed on schedule, NASA bosses should be looking at some hard prison time. Otherwise, what's the point?
That depends on how much control the "NASA bosses" have. If the flow of funds is not guaranteed and the objectives aren't set in stone , as was done in Apollo, then I don't see how NASA can be expected to deliver when demands on them constantly shift and when the rug of support can be yanked without due cause.
A big disadvantage fo DLP is that because it is light inefficient, it needs brighter bulbs with shorter rated run hours to achieve the same brightness.
With LCDs, there is a prism that splits the light to extract the red, green and blue. The color wheel concept with "one chip" DLPs only allow one of those colors in the spectrum through.
DLP projectors typically run from 1000-1500 hours on a very pricy bulb. An LCD projector often runs 2000-3000, and in some cases, as high as 5000 hours in economy mode, and the bulbs don't cost any more.
DLPs are just now getting an edge in what is called contrast ratio, the ratio of the blackest black to the brightest white. LCDs currently max out to 700:1 at best, single chip DLPs can go much higher, I think there are some stock units that are rated at 1000:1, 1200:1, with modifications, some are getting 1800:1, this is due to the simplified optical path where there aren't as many optical elements to scatter light. Three chip DLPs have those elements and can't go as high in contrast ratio.
The biggest problem is that the color wheel concept causes "rainbowing" and because it is composed of very high speed color flashes of red, green and blue, it cause headaches and fatigue in some people. It can take weeks to acclimate to them, but most people don't get enough exposure to acclimate, so it may not be worth the effort if you plan to have a lot of guests.
One thing that I have to say, is that someone (say, Katz) that hated The Mummy AND The Mummy Returns had absolutely no business watching a spin-off and then compl. I think that shows how much of a weenie he is. He shouldn't have thrown his money away on The Scorpion King in the first place. I think he just gets off on whining, like much of the/. crowd.
I don't see how the world is going to change when people hate things about it yet do absolutely nothing substantive about it. For one, I know a lot of people that don't see what is wrong with throwing away $8 to see garbage that they'll so likely hate.
I'm not sure it is worth pointing out the fallacy of arguments made by MPAA haters. Hatred is generally NOT lucid, and the arguments for holding hatred fall apart after a while. Plus, I'm not expecting a lot of intelligence from Slashdot posters on some crusade, particularly when they don't bother to research their facts any more than they pull them out of their arse.
If someone used intellectual property in an illegal manner to create an illegal trust or monopoly, I can see it.
Linux users can't really make a monopoly as there is no controlling body, just a distributed group of independent and mostly unpaid coders that happen to be cooperating for kicks - no single company or person really has any real code, if there were such, others can take the code and go somewhere else.
Actually, in Akira's situation, the film version was based on an unrestored interpositive, the digital version was restored and color repaired.
Something that needs to be said is that some theater chains really have sucky equipment, don't check their tuning and so on, they might be running old equipment and so on.
I do want to see a digital theatrical projection sometime, but I'm sure it's not going to be as crisp as a made-for-IMAX presentation such as the restored Beauty and the Beast.
I'm not responding directly to you, just adding some information for others.
It was only in the last couple years that DLPs had good blacks. Four years ago they had 300:1 contrast ratio, pretty much the same as an LCD, but now they can be had at 700:1 without modifications, but LCD projectors have improved as well, to nearly 600:1 in many cases, but for business presentation projectors, expect to spend at least $3000 for an XGA LCD that is this good, used.
Note that theaters use extremely high light output projectors that run several tens of thousands of dollars so they have units that are in the thousands of lumens.
In a similar manner as the overclocker crowd, individual projector modifiers tweak some parts of the optics to get better "contrast ratio", some claim 1200:1 on an NEC LT150 DLP (a stock one rates at 800:1), which is better than you can get on commercially sold digital projectors at nearly any price.
There is a competing technology called D-ILA or LCOS (don't know what that means) where with good parameter tweaking is reported to go to 1600:1.
I can't say much about the color range, I just don't know.
I think it is all very interesting, I personally bought a nice XGA resolution video projector for about the price of the cheaper rear projection HDTVs in retail, and the picture is IMO better and cabable of being quite a bit larger. And it takes 720p HDTV videosignals as well, something a major share of real HDTVs cannot unless you spend a lot more.
I'm not sure when or where or even the UA situation, are they really a film production company? I haven't heard much of them making movies lately.
I think it was all a monopoly issue, much like if Disney, WB and MGM sold their own brand of DVD players that would play only their own DVDs. IIRC, the studios owned the actors, production, distribution and the theaters and played exclusive, the theaters would either only play that company's films or give heavy bias toward their own product.
I'd probably place $50 that Daewoo players are POS, regardless of whether their firmware can be swapped around.
Incidentally, most Philips DVD players can be hacked using a certain aftermarket universal remote. No firmware swaps. No CD-R burns. You don't even open the case!
The problem is that Philip's DVD players are pretty substandard in quality, their newest flagship, the Q50, was shipped with fundementally flawed firmware.
Um, LDs can hold subtitles in the form of closed captions, BUT, the Japanese didn't use such a system. A good share of my US-made bilingual anime LDs used closed captions for subtitles.
Also there are a few players and LDs that supported an LD-G standard for removable / selectable subtitles. Needless to say, the LD format died before it could have been implemented in the US.
I KNOW this is offtopic, to venture on a tangent, it is similar to to asian languages have no word for "brother" in generic, they have younger brother and older brother. Same with sister. I think some of them have a different word for grandfather/grandmother, depending on whether it is the mothers parent or the father's parent. This is because family and relatives are too important to simply group in one word.
IIRC, most of them have no unified word for rice either, a different word for whether it's in the field, harvested and cooked. Given that rice is such a big factor in their daily life and food, it's not too surprising.
A lot of language concepts are inexctricably tied to culture and vice-versa, and I bet that Klingons wouldn't be any different if they did exist.
It's my impression that the Althlons and P4s are crossbar switch systems. It may not have as many routes - DECpaq called them "D" chips or something like that. Of course, the number and type of such crossbar switches do have an effect on the ability to move data swiftly.
Fine, buy yourself a Mac and generate you're own SPEC scores. No one is stopping you, including Apple.
OK, how to GET the SPEC tests?!
AFIAK you need about $3000 membership just to get the entire test suite that they use. Not worthwhile to just post some relevant numbers about someone else's product.
Besides, I doubt that that person would want to buy a Mac as they seem solidly convinced that they don't perform as well as claimed when properly comparing the performance.
I thought that Xeon was just a more generalized trademark/marketing tag put on their chips meant for server use. Xeon probably won't be replaced for a while, as it has had PII and PIII variations with bigger caches, I haven't kept up but I figure that the current ones are PIV that are slightly souped up. So there might be Yamhill-based Xeon.
Similar goes to Celeron as they are a marketing tag for stripped down low end chips.
IIRC, Norway and Sweden has some interesting consumer protection laws.
Personally, I wouldn't want to move to England because of its BBFC - which makes it harder to get niche videos and drives up their cost, as well as the censoring it takes to get the home video ratings where they want it.
The US has no mandatory home video rating system, it doesn't take much effort to find non-porn videos untouched by any ratings body.
Video CDs are still CDs, just not Compact Disc Digital Audio. They actually fall under a different color book standard, and would have a label saying Compact Disc Digital Video (My VCD has this label, it is a legit release), and do fall under the overall Compact Disc superset, just like CD-R, RW, ROM and so on. SACD of course does not, although some discs try to be backwards compatible, I think the packages note that it works in most CD players.
Slashdot Mirror
"'Anamorphic' DVDs are HDTV quality"
Absolutely not. Progressive scan DVDs are of EDTV quality, they have no more real resolution than HDTV. Anamorphic is simply an aspect ratio stretching, with takes exactly the same scan rate to display it. It may look better, but that is because it is simply a more efficient way to put widescreen video into the same 720x480 picture frame.
HD resolutions are considered to be 1080i and 720p. The lesser resolutions are in the ATSC standard, but are not considered HD, simply digital television.
"Tape streaches. It flexes. It gets worn. It gets demagnetized. It tears."
I've never really had problems with tapes, even heavily rented ones. I'm not saying there aren't any problems, I am curious if the danger is overstated.
Well, I bet audiophiles probably run a spectrum rather than be fit into a neat little category. There are smart ones that let their ears do the listening and then there are ones that will pay more simply because they are told that it is better by a salesman or an ad.
I don't think I'm an audiophile, but I generally demand something just a bit better than what Best Buy offers for speakers and the reciever. I ended up getting a speaker set that was the cheapest that the hi-fi store sold, and quite frankly I haven't been let down, either in the listen test or at home.
"You're supposed to watch your movies on a monitor. That's the only way to view progressive scan stuff."
Do you mean the "best" way, or seriously, the "only technically capable" way? For one, computer monitors are pretty dang small, so I would definitely rule it out for parties.
Rear projection HDTVs can do well, and are progressive scan.
Presentation video projectors that have more resolution than an anamorphic DVD can be easily had as well. It works a lot like a computer monitor, generally with the same 15 pin RGB connector. I bought one and I get decent 150" diagonal picture out of it, so I can get more than one or two people to watch a movie at a time.
"Besides which, cars aren't always going to be damaging to the environment. Eventually they'll be electric."
Apparently you haven't considered the fact that the electricity has to come from *somewhere*.
There are claims that humanity's electricity consumption exceeds our ability to use only minimal-impact and renewable sources of energy. Solar systems are hugely inefficent, and there is only so much wind and hydro power that can be effectively tapped.
So, things might come full circle and your electric car would actually be powered by a dirty coal plant. Some of the first experimental cars were directly coal fired.
Also, my VCR has some sort of Commercial Advance treatment where, once the recording was done, it would go back and analyze the video. When it determines that you just hit a commercial, it fast forwards until the main show starts. It gave me ZERO false positives, and it skipped most of the commercials.
The VCR also had a one minute skip.
At any rate, the ads fly by so quickly it's hard to determine what most of them are for.
I've always used a VCR to record shows and then watch later, skiping commercials.
I think the TIVO shows how poorly the VCR makers made their user interfaces. The only other thing that DVRs really have on a VCR are the program guide and the ability to record while watching, as well as pause motion while still recording.
I can see a new phrase circulating in the Chinese government: "If we can fund Clinton's presidential campaign, then why can't we put a man on mars?"
Toothless: There are no penalties for failure to execute. If the mission is not completed on schedule, NASA bosses should be looking at some hard prison time. Otherwise, what's the point?
That depends on how much control the "NASA bosses" have. If the flow of funds is not guaranteed and the objectives aren't set in stone , as was done in Apollo, then I don't see how NASA can be expected to deliver when demands on them constantly shift and when the rug of support can be yanked without due cause.
A big disadvantage fo DLP is that because it is light inefficient, it needs brighter bulbs with shorter rated run hours to achieve the same brightness.
With LCDs, there is a prism that splits the light to extract the red, green and blue. The color wheel concept with "one chip" DLPs only allow one of those colors in the spectrum through.
DLP projectors typically run from 1000-1500 hours on a very pricy bulb. An LCD projector often runs 2000-3000, and in some cases, as high as 5000 hours in economy mode, and the bulbs don't cost any more.
DLPs are just now getting an edge in what is called contrast ratio, the ratio of the blackest black to the brightest white. LCDs currently max out to 700:1 at best, single chip DLPs can go much higher, I think there are some stock units that are rated at 1000:1, 1200:1, with modifications, some are getting 1800:1, this is due to the simplified optical path where there aren't as many optical elements to scatter light. Three chip DLPs have those elements and can't go as high in contrast ratio.
The biggest problem is that the color wheel concept causes "rainbowing" and because it is composed of very high speed color flashes of red, green and blue, it cause headaches and fatigue in some people. It can take weeks to acclimate to them, but most people don't get enough exposure to acclimate, so it may not be worth the effort if you plan to have a lot of guests.
If the bulb is the culprit in flicker, then how does the flicker syncronize so well with the frame rate?
One thing that I have to say, is that someone (say, Katz) that hated The Mummy AND The Mummy Returns had absolutely no business watching a spin-off and then compl. I think that shows how much of a weenie he is. He shouldn't have thrown his money away on The Scorpion King in the first place. I think he just gets off on whining, like much of the /. crowd.
I don't see how the world is going to change when people hate things about it yet do absolutely nothing substantive about it. For one, I know a lot of people that don't see what is wrong with throwing away $8 to see garbage that they'll so likely hate.
I'm not sure it is worth pointing out the fallacy of arguments made by MPAA haters. Hatred is generally NOT lucid, and the arguments for holding hatred fall apart after a while. Plus, I'm not expecting a lot of intelligence from Slashdot posters on some crusade, particularly when they don't bother to research their facts any more than they pull them out of their arse.
If someone used intellectual property in an illegal manner to create an illegal trust or monopoly, I can see it.
Linux users can't really make a monopoly as there is no controlling body, just a distributed group of independent and mostly unpaid coders that happen to be cooperating for kicks - no single company or person really has any real code, if there were such, others can take the code and go somewhere else.
Actually, in Akira's situation, the film version was based on an unrestored interpositive, the digital version was restored and color repaired.
Something that needs to be said is that some theater chains really have sucky equipment, don't check their tuning and so on, they might be running old equipment and so on.
I do want to see a digital theatrical projection sometime, but I'm sure it's not going to be as crisp as a made-for-IMAX presentation such as the restored Beauty and the Beast.
I'm not responding directly to you, just adding some information for others.
It was only in the last couple years that DLPs had good blacks. Four years ago they had 300:1 contrast ratio, pretty much the same as an LCD, but now they can be had at 700:1 without modifications, but LCD projectors have improved as well, to nearly 600:1 in many cases, but for business presentation projectors, expect to spend at least $3000 for an XGA LCD that is this good, used.
Note that theaters use extremely high light output projectors that run several tens of thousands of dollars so they have units that are in the thousands of lumens.
In a similar manner as the overclocker crowd, individual projector modifiers tweak some parts of the optics to get better "contrast ratio", some claim 1200:1 on an NEC LT150 DLP (a stock one rates at 800:1), which is better than you can get on commercially sold digital projectors at nearly any price.
There is a competing technology called D-ILA or LCOS (don't know what that means) where with good parameter tweaking is reported to go to 1600:1.
I can't say much about the color range, I just don't know.
I think it is all very interesting, I personally bought a nice XGA resolution video projector for about the price of the cheaper rear projection HDTVs in retail, and the picture is IMO better and cabable of being quite a bit larger. And it takes 720p HDTV videosignals as well, something a major share of real HDTVs cannot unless you spend a lot more.
I'm not sure when or where or even the UA situation, are they really a film production company? I haven't heard much of them making movies lately.
I think it was all a monopoly issue, much like if Disney, WB and MGM sold their own brand of DVD players that would play only their own DVDs. IIRC, the studios owned the actors, production, distribution and the theaters and played exclusive, the theaters would either only play that company's films or give heavy bias toward their own product.
I'd probably place $50 that Daewoo players are POS, regardless of whether their firmware can be swapped around.
Incidentally, most Philips DVD players can be hacked using a certain aftermarket universal remote. No firmware swaps. No CD-R burns. You don't even open the case!
The problem is that Philip's DVD players are pretty substandard in quality, their newest flagship, the Q50, was shipped with fundementally flawed firmware.
Um, LDs can hold subtitles in the form of closed captions, BUT, the Japanese didn't use such a system. A good share of my US-made bilingual anime LDs used closed captions for subtitles.
Also there are a few players and LDs that supported an LD-G standard for removable / selectable subtitles. Needless to say, the LD format died before it could have been implemented in the US.
I KNOW this is offtopic, to venture on a tangent, it is similar to to asian languages have no word for "brother" in generic, they have younger brother and older brother. Same with sister. I think some of them have a different word for grandfather/grandmother, depending on whether it is the mothers parent or the father's parent. This is because family and relatives are too important to simply group in one word.
IIRC, most of them have no unified word for rice either, a different word for whether it's in the field, harvested and cooked. Given that rice is such a big factor in their daily life and food, it's not too surprising.
A lot of language concepts are inexctricably tied to culture and vice-versa, and I bet that Klingons wouldn't be any different if they did exist.
it's the crossbar switch architecture
It's my impression that the Althlons and P4s are crossbar switch systems. It may not have as many routes - DECpaq called them "D" chips or something like that. Of course, the number and type of such crossbar switches do have an effect on the ability to move data swiftly.
Am I wrong?
Fine, buy yourself a Mac and generate you're own SPEC scores. No one is stopping you, including Apple.
OK, how to GET the SPEC tests?!
AFIAK you need about $3000 membership just to get the entire test suite that they use. Not worthwhile to just post some relevant numbers about someone else's product.
Besides, I doubt that that person would want to buy a Mac as they seem solidly convinced that they don't perform as well as claimed when properly comparing the performance.
I thought that Xeon was just a more generalized trademark/marketing tag put on their chips meant for server use. Xeon probably won't be replaced for a while, as it has had PII and PIII variations with bigger caches, I haven't kept up but I figure that the current ones are PIV that are slightly souped up. So there might be Yamhill-based Xeon.
Similar goes to Celeron as they are a marketing tag for stripped down low end chips.
Why not non-French Canada?
IIRC, Norway and Sweden has some interesting consumer protection laws.
Personally, I wouldn't want to move to England because of its BBFC - which makes it harder to get niche videos and drives up their cost, as well as the censoring it takes to get the home video ratings where they want it.
The US has no mandatory home video rating system, it doesn't take much effort to find non-porn videos untouched by any ratings body.
Video CDs are still CDs, just not Compact Disc Digital Audio. They actually fall under a different color book standard, and would have a label saying Compact Disc Digital Video (My VCD has this label, it is a legit release), and do fall under the overall Compact Disc superset, just like CD-R, RW, ROM and so on. SACD of course does not, although some discs try to be backwards compatible, I think the packages note that it works in most CD players.