3 ms·

To be fair, the screen may have 1% of a theater's surface area, but the angle of view is more like 30 - 40% of what you get in a cinema.[1] I agree that going

by macrael 15y ago

To be fair, the screen may have 1% of a theater's surface area, but the angle of view is more like 30 - 40% of what you get in a cinema.[1] I agree that going to see a movie in a theater is superior to seeing one at home but that is no reason to dismiss the OP's very real issues with the default TV behavior. The whole point of this post is to educate people who aren't grumpy film snobs on how easy it is to improve the way your TV lets you watch movies and to point out that the incentives for selling TVs do not align well with actually watching a movie. Dismissing the author as a "grumpy film snob" doesn't make sense to me. His arguments seem completely valid. [1]: assuming 40 foot wide screen sitting 30-40 feet away compared to a 4 foot wide screen sitting 10 feet away

mprovost 15y ago
I was referring to data compression not the size of the screen. A Blu-Ray is about 1% of the size of an uncompressed HD film. Of course if you're seeing a digital copy in the cinema it's been compressed down already so a Blu-Ray is about 13% of that. But a Blu-Ray is a tiny amount of data compared to what you see on film. So if you're already prepared to live with that, does tweaking a setting on your TV make that much of a difference to the average consumer? How much of a difference does it make?
- macrael 15y ago
  I'm not sure how the amount of data is very related to the importance of the settings on your TV. Now, of course, all these things are sort of ephemeral, so it is pretty difficult to quantify their effect on the viewing experience, but the article brought up two different settings on TVs that have bad defaults. 1. Color. As the images in the article show, changing the color profile makes a real difference in how you see the movie. Color can set the tone in a movie very effectively, so when it is wrong by the amount seen above, I think it can have a tangible effect on how you see the movie. Home video may carry a lot less information than film, but I've met people who work on color and an enormous amount of effort goes into making the colors look good on TVs and computer etc. 2. Smoothing. It is possible that TV's have gotten better at this, but I have watched movies with pretty aggressive interpolation on and it is jarring. It is a common reaction to feel like the movie has been soap opera'd, but more importantly, panning shots often seem strange because everything moves on screen a little differently than you expect. At least one other commenter in this thread says that they have gotten used to the smoothing effect, so it is possible that over time this will have less of a negative impact than it does now. But I do believe that the best filmmakers understand their medium well and that interpolating does more harm than simply losing 99% of the information to deliver the movie on Blu-Ray. Anyway, I agree that without changing your defaults you could live a long and happy life watching movies without missing too much. But, my main take away is that no one wants the default settings on your TV except the TV companies. It is trivially easy to make your TV better by changing two settings, and it is a crying shame that the defaults picked by the manufacturers are bad.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  Do you use digital cameras or medium-format film cameras when taking pictures?
- mjb 15y ago
  It makes a big difference, because compression and TV settings are very much different things. Compression aims for perceptual transparency: which data can be removed from the signal while not changing a human's experience of that signal? That goal is typically not achievable with the available bitrates in video codecs, so instead they aim as close to this target as possible: remove as many bits as you can without seriously reducing quality. Your argument that 1% is "a tiny amount of data" is technically correct, but missing the point entirely. A vast majority of the perceived information in the signal is retained. This is even more true of sound encoding, where true perceptual transparency can be achieved on most samples at startlingly low bitrates. TV settings, on the other hand, can alter the perception of a signal a great deal because that is what they are designed to do. A good TV (and good settings) and a BluRay will get you much closer to the original signal than an average TV and an uncompressed master.

by macrael 15y ago

mprovost 15y ago

I was referring to data compression not the size of the screen. A Blu-Ray is about 1% of the size of an uncompressed HD film. Of course if you're seeing a digital copy in the cinema it's been compressed down already so a Blu-Ray is about 13% of that. But a Blu-Ray is a tiny amount of data compared to what you see on film. So if you're already prepared to live with that, does tweaking a setting on your TV make that much of a difference to the average consumer? How much of a difference does it make?

macrael 15y ago
I'm not sure how the amount of data is very related to the importance of the settings on your TV. Now, of course, all these things are sort of ephemeral, so it is pretty difficult to quantify their effect on the viewing experience, but the article brought up two different settings on TVs that have bad defaults. 1. Color. As the images in the article show, changing the color profile makes a real difference in how you see the movie. Color can set the tone in a movie very effectively, so when it is wrong by the amount seen above, I think it can have a tangible effect on how you see the movie. Home video may carry a lot less information than film, but I've met people who work on color and an enormous amount of effort goes into making the colors look good on TVs and computer etc. 2. Smoothing. It is possible that TV's have gotten better at this, but I have watched movies with pretty aggressive interpolation on and it is jarring. It is a common reaction to feel like the movie has been soap opera'd, but more importantly, panning shots often seem strange because everything moves on screen a little differently than you expect. At least one other commenter in this thread says that they have gotten used to the smoothing effect, so it is possible that over time this will have less of a negative impact than it does now. But I do believe that the best filmmakers understand their medium well and that interpolating does more harm than simply losing 99% of the information to deliver the movie on Blu-Ray. Anyway, I agree that without changing your defaults you could live a long and happy life watching movies without missing too much. But, my main take away is that no one wants the default settings on your TV except the TV companies. It is trivially easy to make your TV better by changing two settings, and it is a crying shame that the defaults picked by the manufacturers are bad.
chopsueyar 15y ago
Do you use digital cameras or medium-format film cameras when taking pictures?
mjb 15y ago
It makes a big difference, because compression and TV settings are very much different things. Compression aims for perceptual transparency: which data can be removed from the signal while not changing a human's experience of that signal? That goal is typically not achievable with the available bitrates in video codecs, so instead they aim as close to this target as possible: remove as many bits as you can without seriously reducing quality. Your argument that 1% is "a tiny amount of data" is technically correct, but missing the point entirely. A vast majority of the perceived information in the signal is retained. This is even more true of sound encoding, where true perceptual transparency can be achieved on most samples at startlingly low bitrates. TV settings, on the other hand, can alter the perception of a signal a great deal because that is what they are designed to do. A good TV (and good settings) and a BluRay will get you much closer to the original signal than an average TV and an uncompressed master.