>>> I have a friend who has a decent Canon T3i but he can take better exposed shots with his iPhone because the apps can correct the exposure and color in ONLY the areas that it needs, producing incredible pictures with and without bokeh<<<

You can't possibly be serious, or you friend is the worst photographer to have ever lived.

How can you even type something like that? I have access to an iPhone, I see pictures other people take with them. It's garbage. There is no other way to describe it.
Under perfect lighting you may get a decent looking image, but that's about it.

"Problem with today's sound is many young people have no sound reference "

You make an excellent point. I always chuckled when eating out with my father (now long deceased) and he invariably asked waiters if their potatoes were "real." Of course, they always said "yes" and he'd be p.o.'ed when he ended up with a plate of processed garbage. I'd respond, "dad, you know these kids have never eaten real, fresh potatoes. They don't know the difference."

He never quit asking and ultimately complaining -- he knew what good stuff was like.

tom

"People aren't embracing Blu-Ray over DVD like they hoped as most people can't tell a difference."

I can absolutely most certainly tell the difference, at a glance, all the time, from nearly any distance.

It's just that i don't necessarily *like* the HD version better than the SD one, so therefore i'm perfectly happy with SD.

ima a toss in a bizaarly alternative perspective on the music LOUDNESS thing.

When I was young, I heard a song on the radio, then bought the record... played it and it sounded NOTHING like on the radio. I called the station to ask what gives, and they explained what/how/why they used multiband comrpessors. I "LIKED" that radio hyped sounded and expected that was the mix I was buying.

I've always preferred the hyped compressed sound, rather than the "open, sitting in a living room with live musicians, dull, quiet, perfect recordings" dynamic sound.
so... there't that perspective.

I purchase mostly DVDs rather than BluRays because:

While I do have a BluRay player and HD TV .. I only have ONE of each. While I have multiple DVD players around the house, and portable DVD players as well. So I can watch that DVD movie in more places than the BluRay version.

Also, being on a limited income, my HD TV is not as big as it should be to get the full HD experience.

"It's just that i don't necessarily *like* the HD version better than the SD one, so therefore i'm perfectly happy with SD."


That means that sometimes, at least, you like the SD the same or better than the HD version. As the exam questions in high school used to say, "Please give reasons for your answers". If all else is the same, why would you not prefer a sharper version?

SD images are smoother and flow better.

HD images seem to be sharper and harsher than reality. They also seem to suffer more from compression artifacts than SD, even when Blu-Ray bitrates are used (as compared to broadcast). The defects of digitizing moving images are more apparent than in SD.

I remember back in high school we watched a movie about drug abuse and one segment was supposed to be showing what the world looks like to people on speed or meth. The effects they did to the images to simulate it look an awful lot like what HD looks like, compared to SD. It's amplified reality, rather than real reality.

Sounds to me like you have never seen good HD. The world is not a soft and fuzzy place, it is sharp and harsh much of the time.

Unfortunately it seems that our local TV stations, that mostly transmit SD, soften the studio generated video to the point that wrinkles etc. on faces often disappear completely. The faces look like they are made of plastic. Films and external video, on the other hand, look natural.

I don't like "soft" SD video.

I wonder whether they do it to try to flatter the presenters or to make low bit rate coding more free of artefacts. I suspect the former.

When i'm watching Optimum cable at my relatives' house, it's the opposite. The SD channels are crisp and clear, while the HD channels often have that softening. Very much a manikin look. Of course, in that case i'm sure they're doing it to hide compression artifacts from way too low bitrates.

Of course there are many ways to screw up video, but if HD at your friend's house looks like a mannequin, this might be a result of poor setup. I've often heard this "plastic" effect referred to as "clay face."

That link goes to an old AVS Forum discussion, but it may help explain what you are seeing.

Good HD should look clear and crisp, but definitely not "sharpened," at least not in the sense that this term is used when applied as a video effect (i.e., adding white or dark lines around abrupt dark/light transitions). It absolutely, positively should never look worse than SD.

I have never seen anything in SD that I thought looked better than HD, ever. I've never experienced any motion "flow" issues and I've NEVER seen any compression artifacts on a commercial Blu-ray movie. 30-35 Mbit h.264 HD video should look pretty darned good.

I've been watching some Olympics, this is usually when NBC in the U.S. throws all their best technology at a broadcast. I've been watching a fair amount via over-the-air TV here in Albuquerque, the local NBC affiliate has one low-bitrate subchannel and is throwing 15.4 megabits/sec at the main MPEG2 HD video stream (384 Kbps at the 5.1 audio stream), it looks quite good with only an occasional motion artifact with really high motion scenes. The local cable system (Comcast, which owns NBC) has both HD and SD streams of the same programming available, it is very easy to instantaneously switch between the SD and HD feeds, the difference in image quality is absolutely night and day.

Kelly (Chienworks) is perhaps the only member of this forum who still expresses a preference for SD and there seems to be no explanation other than he has never seen HD presented correctly. Of course, there is a percentage of the population that prefers vinyl records over CDs. Given all the inherent flaws in vinyl records, I don't understand that either.

"People aren't embracing Blu-Ray over DVD like they hoped as most people can't tell a difference."

Because most people don't know the difference! And that is because they have never seen it!!!

In addition there are those who have a nice new HD TV connected to a cable box using the RF out of the box to the RF in on channel 3 and they wonder why the picture is no better than SD. A person I know has a 42" HD TV connected that way. That person also is using a combo VHF/DVD player with a composite connection.

And then there are those who use those awful picture presets that can make any video look bad!

Remember the early days of DVD? Cheep companies were putting VHF videos on DVD's and selling them. I have a Blu-Ray that looks no better than SVHS because the outfit that sold it took an SVHS version of a movie and put it on a Blu-Ray. I have an SVHS VCR and the SVHS version of the movie as well.

I have a DVD and BD of a favourite TV series dating from 1995. I bought the BD after the DVD when I read how they had processed the source recording to squeeze the best quality out of it. I haven't done a side-by-side comparison, but the quality looks much the same to me (sharpness and noise).

So yes, BD doesn't have to be better.

If it's a TV series from 1995, then it was never HD to begin with unless the entire thing was produced on film and the film was then scanned in HD and transferred to Blu-ray.

The original Star Trek series was shot on film and Netflix has the HD transfers available. While it doesn't make the original Star Treks any better, the transfers are pretty amazing. They have also done this with the old Twilight Zone, Dick Van Dyke Show, Andy of Mayberry and many others.

oh really, i mean d.i.c.k / d.y.k.e

this is taking pc to a whole new level ;-)

Wow, I just saw that the forum censored that, man, that's pretty heavy-handed. It was only about the most squeaky-clean, wholesome show ever on American television!

Leslie, John talk about ironic . . . . How about that famous flemish baroque artist Antoon van Dyck?

Grazie

"Kelly (Chienworks) is perhaps the only member of this forum who still expresses a preference for SD and there seems to be no explanation other than he has never seen HD presented correctly."

That's putting a little too strongly. Let's say that HD doesn't impress me any more than SD does. That's all i've been trying to say. I have seen good HD without all the broadcast compression artifacts. It is indeed a good picture! Would i pay more for it than i would for SD? Nope. Why? Because i don't enjoy it more than SD.

Good story, acting, scenes, music, and camera work all count *WAAAAAY* more than resolution. Improve any of those and that will impress me. A mere step up from 480 to 1080? Nahh, really not that much difference, and it doesn't really help the things that actually matter.

I am with the rest of this forum; HD is so much better provided it is presented as such. I cant imagine watching any documentary in SD on my 55" TV; it's just so inferior in SD. HD has many challenges including makeup. A good friend of mine worked as a makeup artist for the Vienna Burgtheater and the TV station. With the switch to HD came a hole new set of learning how to make a TV presenter look good without actually showing the makeup. Yes, content is important but so is picture quality or we all would be still watching B&W which I am sure many prefer over color. For me HD and eventually higher resolutions have brought to TV what Hasssblad did to photography, incredible detail.

I won't even ask you about your opinion of 4k then...

I was an engineer, and see technical blemishes in video that my wife never notices, or is bothered with. I just bought a new TV because the vertical lines that were developing in my old one irritated me. I kept looking to see if any more lines had developed yet rather than concentrating on the content. People behave differently.