I'm Conflicted!

I love gadgets. Anyone who knows me can attest to that. Every day I read the gadget blogs to see what's new, and what's on its way. The future can't happen fast enough, if you ask me. Where's my jetpack? Where's my flying car?

On the other hand (why is there always an other hand?) I know that I can't own all the cool gadgets. I can't afford it, and even if I could, where would I put everything? I've also been burned before. Some gadgets are just fads, so it's not worth jumping on every gadget bandwagon. Remember Apple's Newton? Sony Betamax? Laserdiscs? Fortunately, I didn't buy any of those, because they're all now obsolete.

So what I do is observe and see which gadgets seem worthwhile, which ones are here to stay. It took a long time for me to switch from MS-DOS to Windows. I thought a mouse with a scrollwheel was a gimmick, until I used somebody else's and realized that they were actually very handy.

Now we have HDTV. Is it worth it to switch? And if you do, what kind of DVD player do you get? HD DVD or Blu-Ray? Personally, I hate all things Sony, so I'd probably avoid Blu-Ray. But I can't afford it anyway.

When we go shopping, I like to look at the HDTVs. I couldn't believe how expensive they were, especially since the image was so crappy. Until now.

When I go into the stores now, the images look great. Most of the stores, anyway. The images are sharp, and bright, and not full of glitches and artifacts. It turns out that the stores used to display their HDTVs with bad input. They'd hook up a whole bunch of TVs to a single DVD player, splitting the signal so much that it looked bad, especially since they're displaying a low-res signal on high-def TVs. It's like putting a Volkswagon motor in a Corvette. It may seem like a hot car, but it won't run well. No matter how good an HDTV is, it won't look as good as a high-def TV can without a high-def signal.

The stores finally caught on. Now they're showing their high-def TVs with high-def signals, and what a difference!

The funny thing is, they've started taking older TV shows and running them in high def. Shows like Philly, The Agency, Boomtown, The Equalizer.

How can they run these old shows in high def that were filmed before there was high def? What magic is this?

The trick is in the word filmed. Quality shows are recorded on film, like a movie. Film captures images in very high definition. Higher than a high-def TV. Cheap shows are recorded on videotape. You've heard me rant about video before. It only captures a couple hundred lines of resolution. No matter how good the video enhancement you see on CSI and other shows, you can't get more information out of a videotape than was originally recorded. You can't take a standard definition videotape and all of a sudden pull out high def from it. But you can take an old show on film, and play it in high def. The quality shows that spent more up front on a good recording are now seeing new life and getting more money. The cheap shows are still cheap.

You get what you pay for.


Blog Tag: Opinion