RAVE: Bluray

[Arthur Dent]

From experience of messing with frame rates for monitors, I must say you have to be careful with certain frame rates. There's some rates that tend to give people headaches (I'm guessing it was 60 hz since I think that's the frequency our eye processes what we see) but yea, the new trend you'll see in TV development isn't 1080p but rather what frame rates they can operate at

The eye doesn't really have a sampling frequency, but you can get in trouble with CRT monitors when the refresh rate interacts with the flicker frequency of fluorescent lighting. The 720p/1080i/1080p stuff is extremely overblown. Most of the time, the limiting factor is the bitrate and compression algorithm and not the output resolution. 1080i is particularly stupid. Interlaced video is a 1930's hack to make things work with vacuum tube technology. There's no excuse for it being incorporated into modern HD standards.

[ghostrunner]

As far as the frame rate issue, the reason that soap operas somehow "feel" different than most TV dramas or movies is the frame rate. Soap operas are done with video at 60 fields a second rather than the 24 frames/s of film. There is really no good reason for the 24 fps choice in film. It derives from the average speed of hand cranking on ancient cameras and is really too slow. A truer sense of motion would be obtained if the frame rate were increased beyond the perception limit.

I suppose you're right technically, but all I can say is I just don't like it. No way would I want to see No Country for Old Men looking like a soap opera. It's fine for Sportscenter. This is maybe old fogeyism on my part. Though I don't know how you could accomplish the same moods and lighting with a soap opera look. The fact that movies look slightly unreal is to their benefit, IMO.

[Arthur Dent]

The newer technology only opens new possibilities. You can still skip these for artistic effect as with black and white films.

[TimeForGuinness]

From experience of messing with frame rates for monitors, I must say you have to be careful with certain frame rates. There's some rates that tend to give people headaches (I'm guessing it was 60 hz since I think that's the frequency our eye processes what we see) but yea, the new trend you'll see in TV development isn't 1080p but rather what frame rates they can operate at

The eye doesn't really have a sampling frequency, but you can get in trouble with CRT monitors when the refresh rate interacts with the flicker frequency of fluorescent lighting. The 720p/1080i/1080p stuff is extremely overblown. Most of the time, the limiting factor is the bitrate and compression algorithm and not the output resolution. 1080i is particularly stupid. Interlaced video is a 1930's hack to make things work with vacuum tube technology. There's no excuse for it being incorporated into modern HD standards.

I thought bandwidth was the main consideration to 1080i

[Radbird]

So when I upgrade to Blu Ray all of the DVDs that I have become dog frisbies, right??

[wart57]

So when I upgrade to Blu Ray all of the DVDs that I have become dog frisbies, right??

No, the old dvd's look a lot better on a blu-ray player. The only problem you might run in to are with older DVD's that were not made for wide screen TV's, my blu-ray and HD DVD players will play them in a smaller box on my big screen.
I have noticed some of the new HD TV's make the picture seem strange, almost too lifelike and the movement seems off, but I have only seen this at the electronics store, I amn sure this has something to do with the TV settings.

[cardinalkarp]

So when I upgrade to Blu Ray all of the DVDs that I have become dog frisbies, right??

Not necessarily, the bluray players do a fairly good job of upscaling regular dvds. You won't get nearly the picture that you would on a bluray dvd but there's no need to get rid of your older dvds.

[Leroy]

So when I upgrade to Blu Ray all of the DVDs that I have become dog frisbies, right??

This is correct. There is no use keeping them. In fact, we have a DVD waste facility near my house, and I'd be happy to dispose of them for you.

[Radbird]

Shows my ignorance. I thought they were incompatable formats, like Beta and VHS.

[Arthur Dent]

I thought bandwidth was the main consideration to 1080i

1080i and 720p have the same bandwidth. The claim is that 1080i will have better spatial resolution as there are twice as many lines. In reality, you don't end up getting this as:
-The vast majority of HDTVs are fundamentally progressive and have to internally deinterlace anyway.
-The quality is actually limited by the bitrate/compression algorithm. Interlaced material gets worse compression meaning that any theoretical gains are mostly given up.
-Interlacing introduces artifacts.

The proper way to control bandwidth is with modern digital compression techniques not outdated hacks like interlacing.

I should point out that Pirates of the Caribbean was always as crisp as it looks on Blu-Ray. If you had a quality home projection system with a TV sized screen and bought the film on reels, it should look at least as crisp as it did on Blu-Ray. It will look fuzzier when blown up onto a huge theatre screen but with the same level of detail. On standard DVD, the fuzziness is actually coming from loss of detail from the source film. The thing people were talking about in that forum topic was a feature of some TVs that tries to add extra (faked) frames to 24 fps film material to display on 60 or 120 Hz HDTVs. This seems like a bad idea to me. If your TV has this feature, I'd see if it can be deactivated.