XKCD on HDTV

Today's XKCD, HDTV, hits it right out of the park for me. HDTV is such a goddamned yawn for me -- a giant screen with only one window on it? Friends in HD, so you can see all the duct-tape holding the set together and the makeup caked over the actors' pores? Be sure to click through and read the very trenchant tooltip when you hover your mouse over the original cartoon.

HDTV

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

HDTV is good for console video games, don’t forget. I have 2 friends. One has an XBOX and a 1080i HDTV. The other has an XBOX 360 and a standard def 3:4 TV. Only once have they, together, got the full experience from the XBOX…
fsm

It’s 23.997 and not 24, dammit. Get your facts straight. ;-))))
Peter J Cat

Christ, what an asshole.
zaba

This is probably nit-picky, but shouldn’t the “tooltip” be more accurately referred to as the “alt text”? (Even more nit-picky would be to refer to it as the img src title, as that is how it is coded, but I don’t think I have ever heard that reference used.)

Really, it is not a tooltip at all, is it?
- Revan343
  
  It’s not alt-text, the alt in this case says “HDTV”, but I’ve never heard it called a tooltip either.
  
  If I recall correctly, we tend to call it mouseover text in the irc channel.
teh_chris

i get the “only one window” comment. in our family we keep our PCs and the TV with consoles+media center in the same room so we can all sit together while we play our games, watch our movies, etc. that makes it easy to point to your screen when you want everyone to see your game do something cool. our SDTV means one console or media player on the TV at a time.

in our old house, that meant 4 computer desks in the living room, with the couches and TV in the corner.

now that we’ve moved we are in the process of setting up the PCs and consoles in the remodeled attic, and keeping the couches downstairs for more traditional movie watching.

this is nice because you can watch a movie downstairs while everyone else games upstairs, but it also mean that the family needs two screens. it also doesn’t settle the wii vs. 360 problem when it comes to consoles. this is why i am reluctant to get a PS3, even though we would love little big planet.

ideally, i would love an HDTV and a sound system that can split 4 ways, so we can all play our console games and watch movies/TV via wireless headphones, or have one input take over the whole screen when the family is watching a movie or when we are all playing the same console game, like mario party/kart or rockband.

the problem with putting the consoles on LCD monitors is that while it is a cheap way to get each device on it’s own screen, at some point we will all want to play the same thing, which would involve crowding around the same small screen, or someone would want to play a console on monitor that someone’s PC was plugged in to.

sure there is video feed routing hardware for tele-medicine/video conferencing, but it is way overpriced for a family setup.
Antinous / Moderator

you can see all the duct-tape holding the set together and the makeup caked over the actors’ pores

I still haven’t recovered from seeing The Matrix in IMAX.
Tony

I don’t really agree. When done well a high definition movie offers incredible detail. Check out this comparison of Zulu on blu-ray vs. crappy DVD transfers: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare/zulu.htm
- theLadyfingers
  
  I was just about to recommend that site.
  
  For a really stunning display, comparisons (in native resolution) between DVDs and BDs of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
nils.berndtsson

I bought an HDTV because it makes no sense to me to have a different screen format than the format the movie or TV show was filmed in.
jerwin

For watching movies, in a typical living room, 1080p is sufficient. For a computer monitor, it may not be.

When people work at a computer, their eyes move to focus on whatever they’re working on at the time– larger, higher resolution monitors simply provide more places to put things. Just as a researcher may settle down at a desk filled with open books, a computer user may have web pages, pdfs, emails, etc scattered across a 30 inch monitor while typing into a fairly small word processing window.

When people watch a movie– a good movie, not one of those 60 minute rants on the nature of modern capitalism, the jews, and 9/11 on youtube, but a proper movie–, and allow themselves to be drawn into it, neglecting email, the web, and all of the other distractions of modern life, their eyes focus on what the director wants them to see. If the screen is so large that it extends into their peripheral vision, it can become a little fatiguing, particularly if important visual elements are present. If the screen is small, and occupies only a few degrees of arc, it recedes from the viewers mind– it becomes less theatrical.

More importantly, if the screen occupies less than 30 degrees of arc, the extra resolution goes to waste. Higher resolution movies won’t look much different unless the viewer either springs for a bigger set, or rearranges the living room to bring his or her eyeballs closer to the screen.
tophtucker

Cory, you seem to be saying that 1080p resolution is uncomfortably high, but Randall seems to be saying that it’s not that high at all….
- Cory Doctorow
  
  The phrase you’re missing is “with only one window on it.”
  - Brainspore
    
    Now I see what Cory has against Netflix. Why watch a movie from the comfort of your living room on a big screen TV when you could play it in the background of your laptop as you check your email in another window?
    
    That said, I don’t think most consumers ever completely bought into the HDTV hype. If they had we’d have seen a lot more sales of Blu-ray players.
    - rhoderickj
      
      “I don’t think most consumers ever completely bought into the HDTV hype. If they had we’d have seen a lot more sales of Blu-ray players.”
      
      No, I think consumers have bought into HDTV big time, but one doesn’t need a Blu-Ray player to see HD content. Consumers just don’t have a need to buy movies anymore. With on demand streaming from the cable or satellite company or from Netflix, Hulu, and others, what’s the point of buying a movie? Besides, DVD quality on an HDTV is good enough for most people. And there are other benefits to HDTVs, like the size and weight considerations.
  - jif
    
    So, when you have your earphones in, you are listening to what? two audiobooks, NPR and some music? What is your point exactly? Oh, I get it, tv and movies are for stupid people.
  - jere7my
    
    Why would you ever want to watch a movie on something that has another window on it?
    - nehpetsE
      
      Last night i watched Orson Welles “F is for Fake” streaming on one monitor, while reading the wiki entries on ever person it on the other monitor. With out this capability it would have been incomprehensible. Also as someone who learned to edit on vhs, HD is a joy to shoot with. And still digi cams that shoot HD are a godsend for 3D stopmotion animation on a budget.
  - Camp Freddie
    
    Yo dawg! I herd u liek TV, so we put a TV in yo TV so u can watch TV while u watch TV!
  - SamSam
    
    @Cory: I really don’t understand the “one window” comment. You can have as many windows as you want on the screen if you hook your computer up to it.
    
    For me, the only real argument against these screens is: why would I want to spend way to much money for something I don’t need? Just let me buy more gardening and beer-making supplies. But besides that, these other arguments about windows and cell phone resolutions don’t really hold any water.
Anonymous

obviously you haven’t seen ratatouille on bluray, sitting 2 feet away from the screen. that is reason enough to own a giant computer monitor called ‘hdtv’
aelfscine

Jaded Hipster is jaded.
Rider

I love the fact that people will pay a grand extra for differences that are imperceptible to the human eye. I’ve also seen very few sets adjusted to actually look good.
benjymous

It’s similar to the way digital camera manufacturers have started saying their cameras can take “HDTV” photos.

Um, that’s 2 megapixels. Not exactly worth shouting from the rooftops by todays standards.
- theLadyfingers
  
  No, they say their cameras can shoot HD movies. 2 megapixels isn’t much for stills but it’s about as good as home video gets right now.
  
  FWIT, the last season of House was shot on a consumer DSLR. Consumer technology that’s good enough for professionals is a remarkable development, and in my opinion a “wonderful thing”.
Neon Tooth

“Friends in HD”

Uh no, Baseball in HD, Lost in HD etc etc. Netflix instant watch on big screen and so on. I love my new tv!
agreenster

I like my HDTV

:\
Hools Verne

Try getting 1280*800 resolution on a 50″ screen for the same price as a 1080p monitor sometime. It’s not about the resolution, it is about the resolution at that large a size screen. You would think this would be obvious.
Ryanoceros

I guess it depends on how immersive whatever you’re watching happens to be. Granted, “plot”-driven sitcoms don’t really benefit from the extra resolution, but I just finished watching Attenborough’s “Life” series in HD and the extra detail that HD provided was both effective & breath-taking.
PrettyBoyTim

Surely it’s more to do with being able to view HD video rather than having an HD-capable display. The combination of having access to HD video sources, a machine with enough power to play them smoothly and having a suitable display to watch them on is only something that’s been available to most people for the last couple of years.
Der

So is the complaint seriously that HDTV is unremarkable because computer displays have higher resolutions and more windows? That’s like passing on wine because Colt 45 has a higher proof. Surely you would agree that there’s more to a great movie-watching experience than pixels, just like there’s more to a great car than horsepower, and more to film than ISO speed.

Or is it that there’s nothing worth watching in high-def? Granted, broadcast television is a steaming pile of shit. Should I also forswear reading since (seemingly) half the books in print were written by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck?

Come on. The problem’s not the technology, and it’s not even the content. It’s the locked-down trojan horse of suck that it’s packaged in.
etho

I agree with Jeremy. I would never want to watch a movie on a cell phone, no matter the resolution. And I wouldn’t want to watch a movie at my desk, no matter how great my monitor is. See also: console gaming.

I do agree that the 720/1080 thing is ridiculous as research continues to demonstrate an utter inability of the human eye to perceive the difference. But I will still take my HDTV over any of the “alternatives” that Randall and Cory hint at, and I definitely would prefer it over a standard old TV.

And why would I want my TV to have more than “one window?” If your attention span has dropped so low that watching a movie requires further stimuli in the form of facebook, solitaire, or whatever you want those extra windows for, maybe you just don’t like movies?

Honestly, for the things I use my TV for, there is nothing better. It can’t surf the web. OH NOES! Your cell phone has a higher resolution screen! GREAT! Why?

I normally love xkcd, but this one seems to be missing a whole raft of points.
Grey Devil

I’m not quite sure i can understand what the snyde humor in this comic is getting at.

Bigger screens do lag behind smaller sets as far as resolution goes, but does this mean that comparing a large HD screen to a small one with similar resolution that the small one is better?

Of course the larger one will win out because it offers better immersion when watching movies and tv. Especially with content that’s designed to be shown in HD. I really don’t care if they release a tiny cellphone screen that has 1 million times the resolution a large screen has, the fact that its small hinders the experience when you think about it.

But perhaps i’m missing the point of the comic. If i am i’d be pleased to hear what it’s true intention is.
ultranaut

I bought an HDTV and a bluray player recently. The bluray player has a wireless connection to the internet, I stream netflix in HD (I assume 720p) and play movies from my computers. I believe I can tell the difference between 1080p and 720p.
This reminds me of the debate among gamers online during the late 1990′s about whether the human eye can distinguish above 30fps. Supposedly it is impossible and anyone who spent money so they could run their games at higher FPS was an idiot.
apoxia

I think it’s funny! But then again I’m sitting here watching my 21″ CRT television. I do have a 1080p 22″ widescreen computer monitor. It makes my emails look great, I can fit so many words on the page! That’s about as much as I think about HDTV.
theLadyfingers

What, luddites now?

An HDTV is a computer monitor, one that’s also optimised for the playback of 24fps HD video in the native resolution. With my 46-incher, I can sit wth my keyboard on my lap and read the screen at the middle distance, for pete’s sake.

Yes, you could get CRTs that exceeded 1920×1080 years ago, but you paid a damn fortune for anything above 19″, I know, because I did.

Tell me that watching Baraka, Blade Runner, Planet Earth or 2001 is not better on a properly calibrated TV showing them in Blu-ray. You might as well argue that National Geographic should start printing using rubber stamps on onionskin.
Doug Nelson

“I don’t have HDTV” is the new “I don’t have a TV”.
- oohShiny
  
  ” “I don’t have HDTV” is the new “I don’t have a TV”. ”
  
  So I guess this means that my complete lack of any kind of TV is no longer evidence of my hipsterism, only of my poverty?
Anonymous

I just moved my sofa closer to my CRT TV and pretend.
pignoli

This is spot on, as is usual for XKCD. But that doesn’t mean HD is bad, it’s just that in the grand scheme of things 1080*1920 isn’t that high a resolution (okay it’s higher than this monitor, but I spent money on a plasma instead as I sit more than 50cm from my telly). It’s certainly a hell of a lot better than a standard set.
pentomino

While the difference between 720p and 1080p may be imperceptible to most people under most viewing conditions, it has more going for it than the simple “high numbers are better” psychology.

1080p is five times as many pixels, which takes five times as much bandwidth, and so if cable or satellite marketers can condition customers to demand 1080p, then they make it more difficult for them to find Internet video satisfactory.

They could, of course, do something similar by increasing the frame rates of movies. When they show Twilight Zone marathons, they always hit those few episodes that were done on video tape at 60fps, and I always marvel at how smooth it looks, even though it’s just in black and white.

I’ll leave it to compression geeks to tell me whether my assumptions are wrong above.
Donald Petersen

It’s not hard to perceive the difference between 720p and 1080p, provided the monitor is large enough and you’re sitting close enough. And “large enough” and “close enough” aren’t really all that large and close.

Still, I was working in post production on Will & Grace when that show started mastering in hi-def. It was always shot on 35mm film, but the first two seasons were transferred and mastered in regular 4×3 standard-def, on Digital Betacam. Beginning with Season 3, the show was transferred 16×9, but still standard-def. (I don’t think those seasons ever aired domestically in 16×9.) Beginning with Season 7 (if memory serves), the show actually became a hi-def show, mastering on 4-2-2 1080p D-5.

The show won Emmys for cinematography four times (and was nominated six times), and the look of the last four seasons in particular was surprisingly influential on other shows and colorists and DPs. But really, with all due respect to Tony Askins and Sparkle, when it comes to fans of the show, who remembers how gorgeous W&G looked? Like all other successful sitcoms, it was all about jokes-n-laffs. Great cast and great writing. The fact that it looked and sounded as good as it did was completely secondary.

Very few sitcoms are shot on film these days. And none of them need to be. I’d be just as happy watching any given sitcom on an iPhone as I would be watching it on a 54″ LCD. I can’t say the same about most features, nor about plenty of TV dramas like Battlestar Galactica or Mad Men.
loonquawl

I wonder about the HDTV admiration as well. In the same vein: why would Belsazar be impressed by less than 20 flaming letters on the wall, if he could just as well have thousands of them in any scroll?
Also: HDTV has too much resolution, and not enough, just like Obama.
- loonquawl
  
  D’uh, just realized the ‘less than’ sign kills text as it is the html-starter… so again:
  I wonder about the HDTV admiration as well. In the same vein: why would Belsazar be impressed by less than 20 letters, while he could just as well have thousands of them in any scroll?
  Also: HDTV has too much resolution, and not enough, just like Obama.
Anonymous

Really? I have a lovely 65″ 1080 HDTV I tuned and which I use as my computer monitor regularly, in my living room, with a wireless touchpad keyboard, often to the amazement of my cats and friends as well as myself. If I could just aford the right flexible stand I would feel like I lived in a sci-fi story.

Don’t get me wrong. I would LOVE to find a better resolution set and sit even closer to it and bask in it’s beautiful possibilities, but it seems they do not exist in any way I think I could afford.

Perhaps it makes more sense to have it closer to my face like as a desktop monitor, or smartphone, but at normal living room sharing distance, which a group of friends can watch in detail together, well… I don’t understand exactly what the complaint is.

Alternatively while others say they cannot see the difference in detail, I certainly can and I welcome it. It adds to the reality if I am trying to suspend disbelief or gather information. I agree about the 24 FPS – I don’t suffer from the belief it is cheap or lesser to have 60 fps and would welcome that as a replacement.
patrick_bateman

In my experience people who can’t tell the difference between 1080p and 720p fall into one of these categories:

1. have equipment hooked up to it which only outputs a low-ish resolution picture

2. have eye troubles

3. have such poor TV setup that any benefits are thrown away

4. are determined to be uber hip by claiming that there’s no difference and anyone who says there is is a sucker.

I suspect there are a few #4s in this thread. Yes, there are diminishing returns as you go up in quality/technology, but there definitely is a difference between 720p and 1080p. I can’t believe anyone who has watched well-encoded movies on a decent-sized 1080p plasma can really claim that it’s all a waste of time – it lets you have something pretty darn close to what the cinematographer intended in your living room, for god’s sake.

Plus, newsflash, you can plug most modern laptops into your 1080p TV and have as many windows as you want – and you will definitely appreciate the extra resolution then.
theLadyfingers

Bazoink!
jerwin

I believe I can tell the difference between 1080p and 720p.

If you’re comparing 720p Netflix to 1080p bluray, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Sork

Some people sit as far away from the TV that the percieved area is as small as cellphone screen held in the hand, or they have to squint to see what’s happening. My 17″ notebook screen is as big as my 40″ LCD TV at their normal distances.

This isn’t the 1950′s anymore. Get a TV that is big enough for your sofa distance or move your sofa closer to the TV or get at projector. And stop complaining about no difference between 720 or 1080. That’s a 50% increase in resolution and if you can’t see it you are too far away. And lastly, broadcast is in interlaced 1080i, or 720i, not 1080p.
- rasputinaxp
  
  And you crater at the end. 720i doesn’t exist. Digital terrestrial stations in the US broadcast in 720p (Fox and ABC) or 1080i (CBS and NBC).
Hools Verne

Excuse me, 1920*1200. Also the whole reason games look great at 60fps is because they are rendering stuff like motion blur in to mimic that crappy 24fps. Finally, Merry Melodies, Looney Tunes, and Silly Songs were all originally animated for 35mm projection onto cinema screens so HDTV ro cartoons isn’t really all that rediculous especially with animation like Paprika or Chomet’s films.
3lbFlax

I’m with bateman at #25 – the point of HD is you’re getting closer to the creators’ vision. Not so long ago all we had were 4:3 low-res screens, and watching a widescreen fature on those was usually a case of pan & scan butchery, which seem equivalent to viewing a comic book panel-by-panel, and we all know how terrible that is. Or indeed reading a bowlderised novel that’s been chopped down to fit in 100 pages. HDTV is a step in the journey away from those restrictions, and if you’re fond of films it can make an enormous difference.

But in the interests of not being entirely humourless, ha!
- Sork
  
  HDTV is great for getting more resolution out of movies but a Cinema 21:9 is what you desire to get rid of annoying black areas.
PrettyBoyTim

Some time in the next couple of days my copy of Avatar should arrive. It’s the version that comes with both a Blu-ray and DVD copy. In my living room we have a 32″ 720p TV (Well, actually 1344 x 756) and a 24″ 1080p monitor. I’ll set up avatar running off DVD on the TV and off Blu-ray on the monitor and I’ll work out exactly where I have to sit to make both screens perceptually the same size and then compare them. Should be interesting.
- Sork
  
  Remember that the 32″ probably has to scale the input to that resolution.
  - PrettyBoyTim
    
    Sure, but I don’t have a native PAL-resolution display. It’ll be playing the DVD on a PS2 via a component cable. The Blu-ray will be played via HDMI from a PS3.
Mark Temporis

Aside: I hate logging in; I always forget was I going to say by the time I enter my password.

Oh, there it is: I think HD is totally pointless because I live in an apartment the size of a good closet and any TV beyond 19″ is too big. PLUS I have rotten vision anyway. I agree it’s pretty, but got a similar effect just cranking up ‘vibrance’.

What’s REALLY annoying is that my new PC only has HDMI outputs so I *NEED* to upgrade just to output my PC to the TV! Really chaps my hide.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  You can type your comment and then sign in.
- freshyill
  
  It’s a stupid Movable Type thing. not necessarily Boing Boing’s fault. I’m building parts of a pretty involved Movable Type-powered forum, and it’s a huge pain in the ass.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    It’s evil. Just straight-up evil. We have so many byzantine work-arounds to do the most basic functions.
theLadyfingers

As far as high-resolution PC displays go, you certainly can go higher than 1920×1080 quite easily if you’re prepared to spend a bit, but then driving current games at that much resolution is a challenge even for a fairly powerful PC.

1920×1080 is a pretty good sweetspot now. Enough resolution to do most tasks in comfort, and not require a vastly powerful machine for gaming.

Also, as far as HD movies go, you could certainly go higher res if you had a cheap storage medium that could handle more than Blu-ray’s 50GB (a terabyte drive can still hold only 20 ripped BDs…) and if you want to save more space then you need a powerful codec, which means a more powerful processor.

1080p video on Blu-ray, right now, is pretty much as good as it gets. There’s very little artefacting, the sound is incredible. Put it on a decent projector and there’s not a massive difference between Blu-ray and the average 35mm theatre. Which is all I ask from video, really.
Anonymous

Why has nobody mentioned gaming yet? Anyone here ever tried to play a current generation console game on an SDTV? It’s wretched. Certain games come to mind more than others (Dead Rising, for example) because you can’t even read the menu text on an SDTV. I cringe anytime I have to use a UI built for HD res on an SDTV; HD offers game developers a whole new breadth of options to have the extra screen size to play with.
Anonymous

(PS: Don’t even attempt 4-player splitscreen on an SDTV after getting used to an HDTV.)
Taniwha

and we’re stuck with a color space with a gamma curve invented to make vacuum tube black and white TVs cheaper to build 60 years ago. What it means now is that when you mix it with 8-bit YUV and mpeg is that it displays bright colours great but has few codes available for rendering dark scenes – great if you want bright poppy ads, terrible if you want to watch those dark smoky scenes in Blade Runner without artifacts
Rindan

Personally, I find the whole HD and blue ray things silly. Do you know what I do? I stream, that is right, stream Netflix over a crappy internet connection to my old CRT. Do you know the difference in experience is? I watch the same movie and my brain quickly filters out of the visual imperfection as human brains tend to do. I find that this is actually real comfortable. Why? Because my ass is padded by a few extra thousand dollars from all that worthless extra media crap I didn’t buy.

I should also point out that this princple works ever better with cars; nice car, or slightly worse car + tens of thousands of dollars to help smooth out the ride.
- Sork
  
  #36
  That’s like cheaping out on replacing some old scratched glasses because the brain can compensate the vision. Like I do at the moment.
  
  #38
  Recommended distance vs. size is 1.5 times the width of your TV/screen. Any closer and you see individual lines, any farther you start to blur out the details.
  
  #41
  That was a typo. The point was broadcast doesn’t use the full potential of the TV. A compromise between bandwidth and perceived quality.
Anonymous

If you darn hippies watched sports you’d realize that HD is a vast improvement over previous television paradigms.
Ranessin

@34: 1920×1200 is a good sweetspot, 1920×1080 is pretty awkward if you want to do some work besides gaming too.

@30: I’m sorry, but plain physics and biology disagree with you. Yes, you can see the difference between 720p and 1080p – you just need a TV that’s more than 2.5m in diameter or you need to set 30 cm from the TV. Both nothing most people have or do. “I see the difference between 720p and 1080p” is the new “I hear the difference between 256 kbit and FLAC”.
- loonquawl
  
  Humans can resolve 0.3 arc minutes of detail. At 3m distance, a detail 0.75mm big is 0.3 arc minutes. Meaning: At 3m distance, you can look into a screen 50cm high@720 lines and perceive whether a line of pixels is going through, or does a ‘step’ of one line at some point. With 1080 you could not perceive that at this distance…
  Could you cite literature claiming otherwise?
Anonymous

The commercial products I purchased are superior to the commercial products you purchased and they ensure I lead a more meaningful life.
The Chemist

Randall Munroe is failing to understand one very important thing about HDTV:

It’s a status symbol. People will fight and die to justify buying one… and the price they’re willing to pay for one. It doesn’t matter what the facts are about resolution, and the true cost of the technology vs. what’s being charged for it (how much is it to secure one of these contraptions to the wall again? I still can’t believe how many people fall over themselves justifying those costs). I’m less concerned with resolution than size- do you have any idea how small they made the print and tooltips in Assassin’s Creed I&II? I was sitting six inches from my SDTV at times. That had nothing to do with my tv’s crappy resolution so much as the developers’ growing expectation that I’d have an HDTV.

Some of the comments here and elsewhere are hilarious, since they are all a variation on just Not Getting It. The point Munroe is trying to make is that all this stuff about higher and higher definition is disingenuous. We could have better framerates, we could have better and better resolution, but at the end of the day- we’re not using the fullest extent of our technological capacity to make things “more real”. Whether it’s lighting, clever use of lenses and focuses, the way we reach what is widely considered “high value production” is more and more about a certain “look” that if anything- is more about downgrading the “reality” of what’s being seen.

…And that’s FINE. We don’t need TV to look like real life. We watch TV to get away from real life. But HDTV’s are sold with the rhetoric of resolution, when in fact I find that in practice the most attractive part of a HDTV is the brightness and brilliance of color in the display. I have yet to meet the person who can tell- without looking at the tag- what the resolution of a given HDTV is.

What really crossed the line for me was when I saw Blue-ray players being demonstrated by showing The Simpsons. Yeah- I can really see why I need HD for a freakin’ cartoon. It’s Monster cables all over again.
Anonymous

Ignoring the elephant in the room and focusing on the tooltip text: I’ve only watched the BR final cut once, and it was on my brother’s 26″ Samsung LCD TV, which has a frame-interpolation mode which was on by default. At the time, I wasn’t sure whether it was the TV or the remastering that made the film so smooth: either way, the effect was indeed to resume my disbelief as it reminded me too much of home movies.
Anonymous

My dream house (which I have had the good fortune to be living in for the last five years) is hundreds of years old. I am not going to rebuild or replace it for optimum TV viewing. The TV will have to fit the house, instead.

That means a 46″ 1080p-capable monitor over the piano in the living room. It’s what provides optimum viewing capabilities in the existing room layout. I use a Logitech DiNovo Edge keyboard/touchpad from the barco-lounger. The keyboard racks into the charger next to my beer glass.

On the other claw, I totally agree with Randall and Cory’s point that the resolution is not impressive. (My garbage can’s not impressive either, and while I wouldn’t want to do without it I don’t go around bragging about it.)
Anonymous

I see a lot of griping about HDTV and colorspace and fad-ism and holier-than-thou bashing of whatever is becoming hot in the consumer marketplace.

I have a different perspective on HD, coming from a photography background, with a fair number of friends in the movie industry. I’ve owned 1080i televisions, helped set up 1080p televisions and a fair number of weird-resolution plasma displays, and am currently using a 46″ CRT-projector 720p television (hey – it was free, and doubles as the heat in the winter). After spending a lot of time with various HD formats, I can definitely say that you can tell, on a competently encoded HD source, with a good monitor, the difference between the “HD channels” form a cable box and local playback of Blu-Ray.

Some of that is due to bad setup of the video processors at the cable company’s headend systems, some due to bad transfers, and some due to compression artifacts.

To respond to all the haters, do you realize exactly how low NTSC/PAL resolution is? Do you realize how much you lose on a film transfer to standard def broadcast? I do. And hearing people complain about HDTV being pointless is like hearing people tell me that I don’t need all those lenses and those huge cameras – after all, their $120 point-and-shoot is good enough for everybody. I’m a film geek. I like seeing the little subtleties that old-school broadcast TV and YouTube (shudder) “optimize” away.

Should everything be in HD? I don’t know. Seeing restored transfers of Popeye and early Looney Tunes in HD would be a blast – I’ve spent entire evenings talking about colorization, film process, and animation watching old cartoons with other film nuts, and being able to see the additional scan lines, getting freeze-frame pauses that are perfect with no analog smear, and all the other Blu-Ray benefits would be great fun for me.

OTOH, Married With Children may not need the transfer.
Anonymous

I’ve been wondering how 720p is displayed on a 1080p monitor? Each dimension is 1.5 times bigger. Thats wonderful in an analog world, but in a digital pixel world, how is the math done?

Are some pixel color values averaged to fill in the extra pixels? Or are some pixels doubled, and some dropped?
patrick_bateman

Er… do you people realise what an HDTV actually costs? They aren’t exactly in Mercedes territory, more like vacuum cleaner territory. There seem to be a few people here more hung up on the status symbol of bitching about other people’s (alleged) status symbols than the reality…
foobiebletch

I like watching movies. I like being able to clearly read subtitles. I like playing games on my XBOX 360. I like my HDTV. I use it to make the above mentioned activities more enjoyable.
Lady Katey

Awesome. I’m actually looking into buying a new tv because I have to move in a few months and my current tv- a 10 year old 26 inch tube tv- is HEAVY.

Between my shitty contacts and the fact that if I’m actually sitting on my ass watching tv, I’m probably also drinking, I don’t see the point of higher resolution.
Anonymous

Driving a Hyundai sucks compared to driving a BMW. Yes, they both go from A to B. But it’s a lot more fun in the BMW. Watching a BR movie on 65″ 1080p HDTV is waaaaaaaaaay more fun than on my laptop. And yes, you can tell the differene between 720p/1080i and 1080p on a screen that big.
Anonymous

On my TV (42″ Panasonic Viera Plasma) I can easily tell the difference between 720 and 1080. I can flip from one channel that’s broadcasting in 720, like NatGeo, to a channel that’s broadcasting in 1080, like Smithsonian Channel, and I can tell the difference. It’s slight, but it’s there. There’s just this depth to 1080 that’s not there in 720.

And I can damn well hear the difference between a 256 kbps mp3 and 1440 kbps cda (if the levels aren’t shot to hell on the cd).
swestcott

to echo others the human eye can not see the diffrence between 780P and 1080P from 10 feet away

the bandwith required to transmit in full 60 FPS 1080P is so large that almost no cable or satalite provider does it

it you have an antena thats a diffrent story
fataltourist

So his old SD TV was about the resolution of a cell phone. And watching movies in letterbox made the resolution even smaller. I get it.
freshyill

I’m pretty sure Friends was never filmed in HD.
airshowfan

As a pixel-peeping photographer, I am quite impressed by HDTV. Nature shows, and movies with beautiful visuals, become richer and more immersive.

On the other hand, I have a huge CRT, which cost a fortune many years ago. To buy an HDTV that size would cost too much, given that I really only watch about 2h of TV a week. I’m happy to enjoy the occasional piece of HDTV on my computer (which has a really nice monitor for the aforementioned pixel-peeping, and I have a comfy desk chair). It’s not worth spending hundreds of dollars for a new big TV; it’s only a few times a year that I have people over at my place for TV-watching.

And I think the alt-text makes the best point: Fiction films look better with less detail. If the framerate is too high, the focus is too sharp, or the grain isn’t there, they look… I dunno… less like art. Like the movie-makers are trying too hard, like I won’t “believe” the movie unless I can see every wrinkle in every extra’s costume. It’s ok to leave some things to my imagination, to have some things look fake. I guess the joy of patching those things up in one’s mind, or to ignore them so as to better focus on the core story or on the experiences of the characters, has been lost now that theater is no longer the main form of entertainment ;] (My parents got an HDTV that does noise reduction, sharpening, and framerate-increasing “smoothing”, on any video that’s fed to it. I could not stand to watch a movie with all that enhancement done; It looked like I had shot it with my camcorder).

In the end, what we expect video to look like – and what bugs us when video doesn’t look like what we expect – has no real absolutes; it’s just aesthetic taste, plus what we grew up with, and what the manufacturers and content producers choose to provide us with… just like any other expectation of a society about what things should look like (cars, architecture, etc).
patrick_bateman

Here’s as close as I can find to a blind test – more than double the number of people viewing two otherwise identical TVs felt that the picture was better on the 1080p set. This is two 42″ LCD tvs, and on average they felt they could tell the difference from over 10 feet away.

I have heard the old “your eyes can’t resolve the difference” line trotted out plenty of times. Two responses:

1. Ok, my eyes can’t resolve one pixel from another, maybe, but does that mean that the overall impression of sharpness/clarity is impossible to distinguish across an image composed of hundreds of thousands of pixels? I bet you couldn’t distinguish two frequencies of sound right next to each other at the “resolution” of a 64kbps MP3, but you could sure as hell distinguish between a song recorded that way and one recorded at 320kbps.

2. I KNOW I can tell the difference, so I don’t really care what your theoretical calculations say. I dare you to go to an electronics shop and try it for yourself, unless you have never seen a TV before or have vision problems I’m confident you’ll be able to distinguish 720p from 1080p at a comfortable viewing distance. I was as cynical as anyone when Blu Ray and 1080p were first being pushed, but they actually DO look pretty amazing.
Rex Manning Day

As with so many things, the only thing more irritating than the trend itself is people who complain about the trend.

It’s 2010. I haven’t heard anyone go gaga over HD in ages. So quit bitching about people going gaga over HD. It’s a TV that looks better than old TVs. Some people like that. The end.

This just in: Blu-Ray looks better, and holds more information on a disc, than DVDs! Some people like that! Other people hate people who like that! Now all of you, SHUT UP ABOUT IT.
Anonymous

The reason 24 fps looks better to most people than 60fps is because the slight shift from natural movement helps to move the image into a non-real space. It looks less like the reality going on around the screen and so it gets less unconscious comparison to that reality. This helps the suspension of disbelief.
Trent Hawkins

my poor vision provides a natural filter that removes all compression artifacts and all those nasty things you notice when you switch to HD.
shmengie

i know: throw some copper tubing and some gears on there. steampunk it up a bit. then i’ll bet cory’s on board!

seriously, though, i have a friend who (claims he) cannot see the difference between hd and sd. maybe some peoples’ eyes are not sensitive enough to see the difference…?
- MameDennis
  
  Look at the pretty screen. Just look at it.
Art

Ralph Cramden had an astute observation.
Anonymous

It should also be noted that there are no decent HD sources in north america – both cable TV and satellite providers are currently bit starving their content tremendously.

You can have a resolution of 1920×1080 all day, but with a single digit megabits/s bitrate, it looks terrible and blocky and there are compression artifacts everywhere whenever the camera moves.

Any joe 6 pack consumer going to best buy to buy an “HD” television is getting ripped off unless someone explains that this is ONLY good for blu ray and line doubled DVDs. There is no such thing as HD Television in North America, currently.
- dalesd
  
  OTA > FiOS > cable and satellite.
  
  With a simple $30 antenna in my attic, I get about 16-17 Mbit direct from the station’s transmitter. FiOS gives me 13-15 megabits. These are just some back-of-the-envelop calculations based on whatever happened to be on my TiVo.
Egypt Urnash

It baffles me that people find XKCD funny.
- Anonymous
  
  It baffles me people would consider watching Friends, and that of the two, it’s liking XKCD that confuses you.
Beryllium

I’d like to have hovered over the image when I first saw this story, but I was on an iPhone. I don’t even know if it’s possible to see the caption tooltip, let alone how, on an iPhone.
ecobore

yep, I’m sure HD is just industries attempt to make us buy all our DVDs again. I have two HD screens coincidentally.. HD satellite reception and two DVD players, one HD and upscaling for normal DVDs and the other regular DVD…. Sure there IS a difference using a blueray disk, but it is tiny. Really nothing to get excited about…
Snig

The greatest pleasure of having a HDTV: not bothering getting the cable modem that allows HD and then watching Brother-in-law’s face fall every time he’s over and wants to watch sports, only to find we still haven’t bothered getting the modem. Well worth the price difference.
DonBoy

Two points:

– the comic implies that 1080 is the horizontal resolution; it’s the number of horizontal lines, thus the vertical resolution. His comparison to his phone may or may not be right. (And, ahem, if both the horizontal and vertical were twice as good, the whole thing would be four times as good, not just twice as good. Right?)

– I’ve never seen a better instance of “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Pyre

“…so you can see all the duct-tape holding the set together…”

Most likely gaffer’s tape, rather than duct tape. A different fabric and a different adhesive, so it tears apart easily and neatly when you’re applying it, and removes cleanly with no sticky residue when you need to move the set pieces around again.