well, I presume that - seeing as the shape of the screen was already wider than tall - it made more sense to make it wider still that to go "over square" instead. Also is a lot cheaper considering the shape of the walls in most buildings...
Don't forget that "widescreen" wasn't the only crap that they tried, there was also abominable junk like "3D" using red and Green glasses as well as various early surround sound systems like "Sensurround" (Rumblerama, anyone?). The strange thing is that IMAX cinemas often DO make a great play of how many storeys high their screen is! Like something other than angle of view makes a difference to the experience...
Movie screens are just that - SCREENS - they dont really define the shape of the picture that's projected onto them and, as such, are suitable for ANY picture shape within their physical limits. Some higher budget movies are shot with a ratio of 2.35:1 - think Die Hard - but this demands a lot of extra expense and consideration because of the anamorphic lenses that are necessitated - many people also find the optical artifacts of anamorphic shooting to be objectionable.
I'm glad that you mentioned the old Macintosh portrait display - a perfect example of what CAN be achieved with a little care and thought. Not only way the screen both the size and shape of a standard letter page, but it also used a "page white" gamma LUT correction to make it easier on the eye when reading. That screens like this didn't take off is due to short sighted penny pinching as ever - and that the old, rigid Macintosh 72dpi standard was crushed under the clumsy foot of Windows and it's ludicrous "we've got 96dpi so we MUST be better" marketing crap. WYSIWYG is a long distant memory now - it used to be that your Mac screen ruler would match your REAL ruler with no effort on your part at all...
of course a pixel is a point - it's only a square if you display it as square (and BTW, neither CRs or LCD actually display a square pixel, they display several primary colour sub pixels that YOUR EYE AND BRAIN are expected to consider as a single point). Go and look at a CCD imager - are the photosites perfect squares with an infinitely narrow border? Nope. How about a flying spot telecine? Perfect square? Nope, more like a fuzzy dot. Only in CGI does the idea of a pixel having a specifically defined area make sense - and the multitude of different anti-aliasing techniques developed to deal with THAT situation are a testament to the inherent problems with that.
625 TV systems are 720x576@ either 25 frames per second or 50 fields per second. When you watch progressive content (such as most movies) you get no interlace artifacts, MOST video originated material IS interlaced however.
525 TV systems are 720x486@59.94 fields per second. It IS possible to have progressive content at 29.97 frames per second, but it's quite unusual outside of TV commercials and CGI. When you watch movies on 525, you get interlace artifacts because of the hateful 3:2 pulldown system - progressive output DVD players CAN solve this problem for you, however.
it's a stupid idea because a) it's generally confusing and requires constant resampling during post production and b) because it was arrived at from a stupid definition of line length and "made to fit" the available bandwidth. If you had a piece of string that was 43cm long, but you needed one that was 30 cm, would you simply change the definition of a cm? Nope, neither would I, but that's what non-square pixels do - a pixel CANNOT be a 'point' if it has a shape, and TV pixels have SHAPES!
What you're really talking about is "Super 35", and most people don't shoot S35. Some love it, James Cameron is a big fan and I think one of the first S35 projects that really exploited the format was The Abyss - the 4:3 Laserdisc special version was a HUGE improvement on the 1.85 cinema edit. But, then again, Academy/4:3 is infinitely superior to widescreen anyway...
nope, films are still shot in a variety of formats, although 1.85 is EASILY the most popular (as it has been for many years) and this fits in nicely with 16:9 DVD and DTV usage. Many years ago Vittoria Storaro and others proposed a unified 2:1 "system" to cover all of the various TV and motion picture shooting formats called 'Univision' - and, although this has never been adopted officially, a unified 16:9 system is probably what we'll end up with.
As to your points about preferring 16:9 - I do too, WHEN A FILM HAS BEEN SHOT IN 16:9 - but I'd much rather that films were shot Academy and remained so - it's just SO much better. If you've never seen an Academy film in the cinema you should try it - really blows you away after years of watching HALF a frame...
cinema screens BECAME wide and thin when the studios thought TV was going to destroy their business. They were wrong then, just as the TV industry is wrong now. 4:3 is very close to the ORIGINAL "Academy" shape of a movie frame - go and watch Fantasia or something else pre-50's and see what we've all been missing for so long.
4:3 is both more aesthetically pleasing and more practical - look at the world of photography and note that the ONLY reason (apart from panorama) to use anything wider in aspect than 6X7 is for portrait framing (the reason for 35mm's 3x2 ratio and it's biggest success). Worse than the stupidity of widescreen movies of TV though has to be widescreen computer monitors - despite growing ubiquity of the excellent 5:4 ratio 1280x1024 desktop, manufacturers STILL try and convince us that 16:9 or 16:10 are in some way better - even for video editing timelines 16:10 is crap - lists always suffer, and what is a computer display if not a huge collection of lists?
"TV rocks. Type "Charles Poynton" into Google and you'll learn so much about what lies behind your humble TV screen - this is deeply deeply well thought out engineering, that the PC world in its arrogance thinks it can muscle in on."
Oh how wrong you are! TV is a disaster area - nothing makes sense, nothing is how it should be and the whole infrastucture creaks forward based on who can sell football rights to whom. Technically, the four most profound injustices are a) Interlaced scan - this fucking tradgedy was used as a quick fix to the problems of bandwidth limitation 50-odd years ago and yet has actually been PRESERVED by the Muppets who formulated the ATSC spec. b) 29.97/59.94 - a classic case of "evolution not revolution" this one has been causing headaches in post production for ever, and always will.... (look up drop frame timecode and shudder) c) non-square pixels - a concept that ONLY a video engineering comittee could EVER come up with - don't even TRY and get your head around WHY d) 3:2 pulldown - an astonishing solution to an unneccesary problem - as with all TV engineering, creates more problems than it solves.
I could go on, and bore you with the insanity of widescreen (although the movie industry bears a large part of the responsibilty for THAT one) but I won't, suffice it to say that in TV engineering, there's five problems for every solution.
"1x PowerMac (not sure what proc it is...) 60 mhz"
almost certainly a Power PC 601 - the 603s generally ran at between 100 and 300MHz and the 604 likewise - I don't think the 602 was used in a Mac at all - anyone know different?
why do you have SO MANY obsolete computers? I mean - come on! - I've got:-
Commodore 64 (Z80) Amiga 500+ (Motorola MC 68000) Apple Macintosh Colour Classic (Motorola MC 68030) Apple Newton Messagepad 2100 (ARM sa110) Toshiba Satellite Pro 490 (Intel PII 266) Apple PowerMac G3 (IBM PPC 750) Apple PowerMac G4 (2x Motorola MPC 7400) Sony Playstation2 (Sony/Toshiba MIPS IV subset 'Emotion Engine') Sony Clié SJ-30 (Motorola Dragonball Z)...and I honestly use only half of them - what on earth do you do with all of yours?
I certainly don't have all of THOSE, but I DO have an MC 68040 (came out of my old Quadra) on my mantlepiece - it's rather a pretty, abstract, cubic structure with it's attached (ie directly glued on) heatsink. New chips just aren't as pretty...
Sony have consistently designed and manufactured some of the finest electronics for the last 40 years. I work in TV, and I can assure you that their design, quality, performance and reliability is second to none.
I wouldn't go anywhere without my Sony shortwave radio and Discman.
I stand corrected - I only have ONE laptop, and it's a fine old Toshiba Satellite Pro 490. Built like a tank, hopeless for carrying but with a lovely bright screen and a nice deep keyboard, it's great for using!
Slashdot Mirror
well, I presume that - seeing as the shape of the screen was already wider than tall - it made more sense to make it wider still that to go "over square" instead. Also is a lot cheaper considering the shape of the walls in most buildings...
Don't forget that "widescreen" wasn't the only crap that they tried, there was also abominable junk like "3D" using red and Green glasses as well as various early surround sound systems like "Sensurround" (Rumblerama, anyone?). The strange thing is that IMAX cinemas often DO make a great play of how many storeys high their screen is! Like something other than angle of view makes a difference to the experience...
Movie screens are just that - SCREENS - they dont really define the shape of the picture that's projected onto them and, as such, are suitable for ANY picture shape within their physical limits. Some higher budget movies are shot with a ratio of 2.35:1 - think Die Hard - but this demands a lot of extra expense and consideration because of the anamorphic lenses that are necessitated - many people also find the optical artifacts of anamorphic shooting to be objectionable.
I'm glad that you mentioned the old Macintosh portrait display - a perfect example of what CAN be achieved with a little care and thought. Not only way the screen both the size and shape of a standard letter page, but it also used a "page white" gamma LUT correction to make it easier on the eye when reading. That screens like this didn't take off is due to short sighted penny pinching as ever - and that the old, rigid Macintosh 72dpi standard was crushed under the clumsy foot of Windows and it's ludicrous "we've got 96dpi so we MUST be better" marketing crap. WYSIWYG is a long distant memory now - it used to be that your Mac screen ruler would match your REAL ruler with no effort on your part at all...
of course a pixel is a point - it's only a square if you display it as square (and BTW, neither CRs or LCD actually display a square pixel, they display several primary colour sub pixels that YOUR EYE AND BRAIN are expected to consider as a single point). Go and look at a CCD imager - are the photosites perfect squares with an infinitely narrow border? Nope. How about a flying spot telecine? Perfect square? Nope, more like a fuzzy dot. Only in CGI does the idea of a pixel having a specifically defined area make sense - and the multitude of different anti-aliasing techniques developed to deal with THAT situation are a testament to the inherent problems with that.
you're wrong about this
625 TV systems are 720x576@ either 25 frames per second or 50 fields per second. When you watch progressive content (such as most movies) you get no interlace artifacts, MOST video originated material IS interlaced however.
525 TV systems are 720x486@59.94 fields per second. It IS possible to have progressive content at 29.97 frames per second, but it's quite unusual outside of TV commercials and CGI. When you watch movies on 525, you get interlace artifacts because of the hateful 3:2 pulldown system - progressive output DVD players CAN solve this problem for you, however.
it's a stupid idea because a) it's generally confusing and requires constant resampling during post production and b) because it was arrived at from a stupid definition of line length and "made to fit" the available bandwidth. If you had a piece of string that was 43cm long, but you needed one that was 30 cm, would you simply change the definition of a cm? Nope, neither would I, but that's what non-square pixels do - a pixel CANNOT be a 'point' if it has a shape, and TV pixels have SHAPES!
What you're really talking about is "Super 35", and most people don't shoot S35. Some love it, James Cameron is a big fan and I think one of the first S35 projects that really exploited the format was The Abyss - the 4:3 Laserdisc special version was a HUGE improvement on the 1.85 cinema edit. But, then again, Academy/4:3 is infinitely superior to widescreen anyway...
nope, films are still shot in a variety of formats, although 1.85 is EASILY the most popular (as it has been for many years) and this fits in nicely with 16:9 DVD and DTV usage. Many years ago Vittoria Storaro and others proposed a unified 2:1 "system" to cover all of the various TV and motion picture shooting formats called 'Univision' - and, although this has never been adopted officially, a unified 16:9 system is probably what we'll end up with.
As to your points about preferring 16:9 - I do too, WHEN A FILM HAS BEEN SHOT IN 16:9 - but I'd much rather that films were shot Academy and remained so - it's just SO much better. If you've never seen an Academy film in the cinema you should try it - really blows you away after years of watching HALF a frame...
DTV penetration is up to about 4 million-odd now. Not great, but not as bad as all that either.
"HD VC"R"'s and DVD's will have digital inputs. Only."
call me picky, but what is the point of an INPUT on a DVD player?
no, it isn't
if it were 30Hz it would be 1080P
no it isn't
cinema screens BECAME wide and thin when the studios thought TV was going to destroy their business. They were wrong then, just as the TV industry is wrong now. 4:3 is very close to the ORIGINAL "Academy" shape of a movie frame - go and watch Fantasia or something else pre-50's and see what we've all been missing for so long.
4:3 is both more aesthetically pleasing and more practical - look at the world of photography and note that the ONLY reason (apart from panorama) to use anything wider in aspect than 6X7 is for portrait framing (the reason for 35mm's 3x2 ratio and it's biggest success). Worse than the stupidity of widescreen movies of TV though has to be widescreen computer monitors - despite growing ubiquity of the excellent 5:4 ratio 1280x1024 desktop, manufacturers STILL try and convince us that 16:9 or 16:10 are in some way better - even for video editing timelines 16:10 is crap - lists always suffer, and what is a computer display if not a huge collection of lists?
"TV rocks. Type "Charles Poynton" into Google and you'll learn so much about what lies behind your humble TV screen - this is deeply deeply well thought out engineering, that the PC world in its arrogance thinks it can muscle in on."
Oh how wrong you are! TV is a disaster area - nothing makes sense, nothing is how it should be and the whole infrastucture creaks forward based on who can sell football rights to whom. Technically, the four most profound injustices are a) Interlaced scan - this fucking tradgedy was used as a quick fix to the problems of bandwidth limitation 50-odd years ago and yet has actually been PRESERVED by the Muppets who formulated the ATSC spec. b) 29.97/59.94 - a classic case of "evolution not revolution" this one has been causing headaches in post production for ever, and always will.... (look up drop frame timecode and shudder) c) non-square pixels - a concept that ONLY a video engineering comittee could EVER come up with - don't even TRY and get your head around WHY d) 3:2 pulldown - an astonishing solution to an unneccesary problem - as with all TV engineering, creates more problems than it solves.
I could go on, and bore you with the insanity of widescreen (although the movie industry bears a large part of the responsibilty for THAT one) but I won't, suffice it to say that in TV engineering, there's five problems for every solution.
Hey! dubiousmike
the Jerk store called.
they're running out of you!
"1x PowerMac (not sure what proc it is...) 60 mhz"
almost certainly a Power PC 601 - the 603s generally ran at between 100 and 300MHz and the 604 likewise - I don't think the 602 was used in a Mac at all - anyone know different?
sorry, my mistake, but my two correctors seem to have a difference of opinion :-]
Any C=64 hexperts around with the straight dope on the C=64 motherboard?
err...
...and I honestly use only half of them - what on earth do you do with all of yours?
why do you have SO MANY obsolete computers? I mean - come on! - I've got:-
Commodore 64 (Z80)
Amiga 500+ (Motorola MC 68000)
Apple Macintosh Colour Classic (Motorola MC 68030)
Apple Newton Messagepad 2100 (ARM sa110)
Toshiba Satellite Pro 490 (Intel PII 266)
Apple PowerMac G3 (IBM PPC 750)
Apple PowerMac G4 (2x Motorola MPC 7400)
Sony Playstation2 (Sony/Toshiba MIPS IV subset 'Emotion Engine')
Sony Clié SJ-30 (Motorola Dragonball Z)
just exactly HOW is an INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE SCSI disk subsystem going to help out a gamer again?
I certainly don't have all of THOSE, but I DO have an MC 68040 (came out of my old Quadra) on my mantlepiece - it's rather a pretty, abstract, cubic structure with it's attached (ie directly glued on) heatsink. New chips just aren't as pretty...
...you left out the Smart Media that my (otherwise excellent) Fuji Finepix 601 uses!
Sony have consistently designed and manufactured some of the finest electronics for the last 40 years. I work in TV, and I can assure you that their design, quality, performance and reliability is second to none.
I wouldn't go anywhere without my Sony shortwave radio and Discman.
either you are incredibly naiive, you haven't heard of "market failure" or you missed the whole DOJ/MS case.
why don't you burn his house down?
I would
I stand corrected - I only have ONE laptop, and it's a fine old Toshiba Satellite Pro 490. Built like a tank, hopeless for carrying but with a lovely bright screen and a nice deep keyboard, it's great for using!
and just how much would a winders machine be worth?
yeah, but we don't get to VOTE for Bill Gates, do we?
schmuck
Seeing as you can't spell, why should we believe that you can reason?
Eh?