Any way to get lower bit colors?

[olePigeon]

Too bad widescreen TVs didn't debut at 21:9 like they should have.  Now we have two different screen ratios both called 4K: the original, DCI standard at 4096x2160; and the TV marketing shenanigans at 3840x2160... which isn't even close to 4K.  Used to be just called 2160p or UHD.

It's like 4G for cell phones.  They slap the label on everything, even stuff we used to call 3G.  It's now magically called 4G because... reasons.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

I hate all the multi-letter resolution designations. Just use the stinking numbers. WXUYVHYEJ doesn't mean anything to anyone except some engineer. People can grasp numbers, they'll realize that 1366x768 is less than 1920x1080. 4K tv's may not be full 4K resolution, but it's a better name than UHD. Calling it Ultra High Definition is just going down the same road USB is, where we went to High Speed, and now we have Super Speed. What's next, Super Duper Speed? And Super Mega Ultra High Definition?

/rant

 

[olePigeon]

How is 4K better than UHD?  They're both meaningless in relation to what they represent, and mean nothing compared to the existing 720p and 1080p.

They already had a naming scheme, they should have kept it.  The vertical, progressive or interlaced resolution was fine.  720p, 1080p, and now 2160p seem fine to me.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

Twenty one sixty is four syllables. 720 and 1080 are two. 4K is two. Saving breath man!

 

[wilykat]

Twenty one sixty is four syllables. 720 and 1080 are two. 4K is two. Saving breath man!

Twen-ty one six-ty four looks like 6 syllables to me

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

It's actually five. Neither of us can count lol.

 

[olePigeon]

Can I now rant about the choice of 16:9 over 21:9 for home video discs and displays, making widescreen not widescreen enough and messing up home movies for the foreseeable future?

 

[techknight]

did we forget to take english and math classes? 

 

[wilykat]

Or forgot what we learned. I finished high school 21 years and 5 months ago.  

When I started school, Commodore PET was the new "easy" computer and my school was the lucky few to have some in library.  Finished Wines school with C64 and Apple II. Finished middle school with IBM PS/1 (the odd looking one that looks like early Macintosh style ZFP hard drive under a mono display) series and Apple IIgs

 

[Paralel]

Can I now rant about the choice of 16:9 over 21:9 for home video discs and displays, making widescreen not widescreen enough and messing up home movies for the foreseeable future?

Just think, by the time they are ready to switch to an entirely new layout (like they did from 4:3 to 16:9) maybe you'll get lucky and they'll go to 21:9

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Twen-ty one six-ty four looks like 6 syllables to me

Teen-ty-one six-ty is 5 syllables but when you add the "p" it's six.

Se-ven twen-ty is 4, not 2 as noted above and ten-eigh-ty is three, again, not 2 as noted.

Whatever! The average consumer doesn't really understand the letter designations OR numeric descriptives with the "p" suffix, not to mention having absolutely no clue whatsoever about aspect ratios or comparing which might be better for what.

Don't even get me started about upscaling or downscaling, John and Jane Q. Public can't get past whining that they should be able the make the letterbox bands go away.

Dunno about the rest of you, but Mirriam, Harbrace and Roget are my bedside companions.

.

 

[wilykat]

Or the ehanced version with 120Hz upscale (which looks really bad when you're playing an animated video like Disney movie) and those enhanced with extra color: Yellow (RYGB instead of normal RGB) to try and get better yellow color but since standard video is RGB only the result may be oversaturated yellow or weaker red/green. And then there's 3D, LED, plasma, infinity contrast, etc.  I gave up on the marking BS and looked through Consumer Digest for decent midrange TV.

 

[olePigeon]

Just think, by the time they are ready to switch to an entirely new layout (like they did from 4:3 to 16:9) maybe you'll get lucky and they'll go to 21:9

Maybe, but you can be assured that Comcast will charge a $20/month premium to remove the black bars on either side of the screen.

 

[Gorgonops]

I'm pretty fine with 16:9 instead of 21:9 as the standard aspect ratio, at least for however long ATSC lasts as a standard. Something tells me it's a little optimistic to hope we get 50 years out of it like we did with NTSC, but it probably has at least a decade or two of mileage left in it. In my unscientific opinion displaying 4:3 content on a 16:9 screen (and there's a lot of 4:3 content out there) without stretching/distortion wastes an "acceptable" amount of screen real estate compared to the nearly half the screen you'd lose with 21:9. (Of course, there'd undoubtedly still be morons who'd stretch 4:3 to 21:9 because making everyone look like Stewie Griffin is somehow preferable to seeing black bars on the screen, but I'm going to pretend those people don't count.) Yes, then there's the problem of having to letterbox cinematic content and wasting a similar proportion of screen real estate for movies in their original format, but I don't use my TV *just* for movies so I'm fine with having to compromise a little.

(If you want to be pedantic even 21:9 isn't wide enough to show full CinemaScope without cropping or letterboxing.)

Nor am exactly chomping at the bit for 4K. The data transfer requirements are still unwieldy; you basically need a hard disk to carry a full resolution 4k movie around and given how American telecom companies are prioritizing squeezing ever more money out of their subscribers over building out their networks streaming isn't going to be a realistic option for a while either. And further, unless you sit too close to your TV or have built your own full-up Home Theatre the increased resolution is mostly wasted anyway. (Chances are really good that your existing HD TV is already a "Retina Display" according Apple's definition.)

120Hz upscale

Yegads. My Sharp brand TV was set up to do that out of the box and I think I was about five minutes into the first cartoon before I was frantically digging through the menus to disable it. (Luckily you can.) It's *weird* and sort of unnerving; it adds this strangely reptilian "slithering" aspect to animated programs on top of making live action movies look like cheap soap operas. Seriously, who asked for this feature?

If you'd asked before I'd experienced it if I thought the human brain would even really be able to perceive the "halfway" frames being generated between the real ones I would have been somewhat sceptical of the idea. But, no, it does see it, and it's scary as **ll.

 

[wilykat]

That 120Hz upscale might have been geared for live sport events.  Still a bad idea (big waste of $$$) because most people can't perceive individual frames at 60Hz anyway.  It's like using expensive 93-octane gasoline when most car won't show any difference using cheaper 87 gas.

 

[Gorgonops]

With all the editing and computer manipulation that happens to big-ticket sporting events before they even leave the studio people might as well just watch their teenage kids play John Madden Football on a Playstation instead. At least what they'll be seeing is arguably more authentic. (It's "generated" as opposed to "manipulated".)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I was bored at work the other night and ran some numbers:

4096 x 2160 letterboxed to 21:9 wastes only 19% of the available pixels.

3480 x 2160 letterboxed to 21:9 jumps the wast to 24% of the pixels you paid to get

1/5 or 1/4 (close enough for comparison) of pixels tossed down the oubliette of the aspect ratio inquisition.

Movie theaters have always been letterboxed by curtain adjustments to cover the unused sides of the screen. The unwashed masses never noticed that, now the want the full screen experience they've been used to before big (wide) screen TV and ubiquity of full screen content at long last.

 

[Gorgonops]

One thing to remember about 4K in the "cinema" context (as opposed to TV flat panels) is although 4096x2160 results in a "square pixel" 19:1 aspect ratio it's pretty common for anamorphic lenses to be used to display super-widescreen/CinemaScope content without sacrificing vertical resolution; IE, instead of "throwing away" pixels they're all used, they're just not necessarily square anymore. (It's *possible* to fit extremely-high-end home theater projectors with lenses like this, but most people just fake it by using a zoom function to automatically best-fit the "active content area" of letterboxed material onto the available projection space.) Since the "normal" consumer television market almost entirely consists of panels instead of projection you don't really have the option to use adaptive optics or whatnot to keep from wasting pixels so it's inevitable that *any* shape is going to leave some people unhappy with how their content is displayed on it.

I don't think anyone would argue that 16:9 is the "perfect" shape but it was specifically chosen as a compromise between widescreen cinema and legacy 4:3 content (which technically includes movies made well into the 1970's). The TV industry *for now* seems to be concentrating their efforts behind pushing the 16:9 "UHD" standard in part for the same reason that Apple just quadrupled the pixel counts on their Retina iPads; they can sell it as being some sort of quantum leap in quality while letting it be 100% backwards compatible with its predecessor with just a hamfisted 2x scaleup of existing content. (Again, there have been a few 21:9 TVs marketed but in practice they've tended to bomb on the market. A big factor in this is that blue-ray is natively 1920x1080 and, just like DVD, it adds black bars to widescreen content. This forces a 21:9 TV to upscale and thus arguably lose picture quality compared to the same thing displayed on a taller-but-similar-width 16:9 set. Until there's a standard for ultra-widescreen content that doesn't require upscaling hacks this is a problem for *any* oddball-shaped panel.) Again, I'm not completely sold on this whole thing; 4K TVs do look awesome when you're face to face with them in the showroom and the TV is playing a native resolution demo, but in your living room it's really not going to make much difference and unless all you do is watch a small collection of movies and highly-compressed online content all it's going to be doing is upscaling 1080p-or-less feeds. And honestly I'm sick enough with the scaler on my 1080P set's (and it's 720p predecessor's, for that matter)  attempts to lie to me already. Bleah.

 

[trag]

Can I now rant about the choice of 16:9 over 21:9 for home video discs and displays, making widescreen not widescreen enough and messing up home movies for the foreseeable future?

Quiet! Or they'll make your laptop screen completely unusable for productivity apps and all it will be good for is watching films.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

OOOOH!!!!!!!!!! ;D

Now imagine it with that Wide@$$ Aspect Retina Display . . .

. . . but with vast expanses of unused real estate on either side of a centered KBD.

.