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Re: Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Interesting photo essay. I hope you stuck around to watch that bowl game on Fox, which turned out to be the most interesting football game of the entire bowl season and probably of the entire BCS era. I watched the Outback Bowl, the wretched Rose Bowl, and the Fiesta Bowl on our three year old analog standard definition 32 inch Toshiba. It looked great. Between the Outback Bowl and the Rose Bowl, my wife and I went over to some friends' house to go out for lunch. They had just gotten a new rear-projection HDTV. They were showing me how great sports looked on it. Honestly, I thought it looked better on my Toshiba. I've seen the same thing on my brother-in-law's set, which is also rear projection. Analog standard definition TV doesn't start to look bad to my eyes until you get to the really big screens, and my family room isn't really big enough to support a really big screen; 32 inches is about right here. So it'll be a while before I get an HDTV set (other than the card in my Linux box which has allowed me to play with it). The other lesson I've learned is to avoid rear projection sets. :-) You touched on this in one of your shots, but one reason I don't feel compelled to get an HDTV set is the way they get pictures to work on both high-def and standard definition sets. Maybe it's just the years I spent operating a TV camera coming out here, but it seems incredibly difficult to compose a picture that works equally well on both. From a visual standpoint, TV is still composed to work on standard def sets, and it seems rare to me to see compelling composition of a high def picture. Mostly high def just looks like a lot of meaningless empty space on either side of the important stuff. Mostly, that extra space is wasted. For football games, 40 years of watching football on TV has trained me to think that the little scoreboard information thingy that ESPN uses should be up against the side of the screen. On SDTV it is. On HDTV, it looks like it's floating uncomfortably in space. Like I said, maybe it's just me; even most standard def TV doesn't have the composition or mise-en-scene of a great painting. :-) No doubt this is different for movies, where screen composition is generally in an aspect ratio much closer to the 16:9 ratio of HDTV than it is to the 4:3 ratio of NTSC. When HDTV movies are widely available, I'll have to reconsider.
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