Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says, there's
Speaker 1: Frank's remote control. You can look, but don't touch it please.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. Hello everyone, Hello Joe.
Speaker 1: How are you all doing today? How about you? I'm
Speaker 1: doing just fine. Yeah, I got a question for both
Speaker 1: of you? Did you make any New Year's resolution? See
Speaker 1: that joke's only funny if you already know what the
Speaker 1: topic is, and then it's not even funny, But it's
Speaker 1: a good point. We're talking about. We're talking about resolution,
Speaker 1: television resolution. In this episode, I recently attended c e
Speaker 1: S and one of the big things that's always a
Speaker 1: huge presence at c S is uh, it's high definition
Speaker 1: and beyond TVs. Jonathan, I have a question for you.
Speaker 1: Ask me your question, Joe. Okay, while you were at
Speaker 1: cs what was the greatest number of TVs you were
Speaker 1: ever watching at the same time simultaneously. That oh, probably
Speaker 1: somewhere in the realm of forty because there are entire
Speaker 1: walls that are just made up of various televisions and displays,
Speaker 1: so sometimes they all work together to form one image,
Speaker 1: but you're still watching forty different TVs. Is it like
Speaker 1: at best Buy where they're all showing the same Mark
Speaker 1: Wahlberg movie at the same time, or do they have
Speaker 1: different stuff playing? They had different what Mark Wahlberg movies
Speaker 1: playing simultaneously. No, Actually, the it depended on the the
Speaker 1: place you were at and what the TVs were trying
Speaker 1: to show, like anything that's doing ultra high definition and
Speaker 1: beyond or I guess you could just say uh D
Speaker 1: because technically eight K is still in that category. Uh
Speaker 1: tends to have a loop of various you know, supposed
Speaker 1: to be all inducing images, things that have lots of
Speaker 1: different color and contrast, something where the detail is really
Speaker 1: important in the image. There's usually no um, no content
Speaker 1: that has like dialogue or anything. It's all about images.
Speaker 1: So uh you know, usually it's it's also video because
Speaker 1: you don't want to have just a still photo up there.
Speaker 1: But it will be like a Chinese dragon at a parade.
Speaker 1: That's that's a typical one, right, sunrises or ocean you know,
Speaker 1: something like like fish beneath the sea, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So it's all about, you know, lots of different colors
Speaker 1: and vibrant and uh images and lots of motion to
Speaker 1: really show off what the televisions are capable of. And
Speaker 1: I wanted to kind of talk a little bit in
Speaker 1: this episode about what resolution is because you know, now
Speaker 1: we're in that era of four K becoming the standard,
Speaker 1: Like it's I would say that the year is the
Speaker 1: first time we're really seeing four K move beyond the
Speaker 1: early adopter stage and try to push into mainstream, which
Speaker 1: means that a lot of people probably have questions about
Speaker 1: it and they're wondering what exactly sets it apart, how
Speaker 1: is it different from earlier versions, and and you know,
Speaker 1: just kind of an overview Yeah, yeah, because I mean
Speaker 1: you see all of this kind of marketing or advertising
Speaker 1: material all the time about how totally awesome this new
Speaker 1: television is and how much you need it in your
Speaker 1: house right now. Um, And I have well, I mean
Speaker 1: it's I do because I've researched this kind of stuff
Speaker 1: for tech stuff in this episode before. UM, but I
Speaker 1: don't think that the average consumer really has a good
Speaker 1: grip on what any of that means. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: and furthermore, like yeah, like like, where is all of
Speaker 1: this technology moving towards in the future? Like, are are
Speaker 1: we going to get to sixteen K? Is it going
Speaker 1: to be thirty two K? That? What? Will we just
Speaker 1: have television screens literally in our eyeballs? I mean that's
Speaker 1: these are all great questions and we're going to be
Speaker 1: looking at them, uh figuratively because this is an audio podcast.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, this is this is exactly why I
Speaker 1: wanted to have this conversation. Okay, So the numbers that
Speaker 1: are represented when you hear people bragging about their different
Speaker 1: screen resolutions, you know, we've got tin ADP or we've
Speaker 1: got four K. What do those numbers mean? What do
Speaker 1: they represent? All right? Those numbers represent a basic unit
Speaker 1: called a pixel. And you can kind of think of
Speaker 1: pixel as like a point of light on your television.
Speaker 1: And that point of light can be various colors, doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be you know, just pure white or whatever.
Speaker 1: But your your television screen, the image on the screen
Speaker 1: is made up of a collection of pixels, all of
Speaker 1: various colors, changing at a speed that's faster than we
Speaker 1: can detect with the naked eye. And that's what gives
Speaker 1: us the illusion of Hey, there's Matthew McConaughey, uh being
Speaker 1: awesome on my TV. Yeah. Yeah, each pixel has the
Speaker 1: capacity to be I mean basically red, green, or blue. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really what we're looking at, any combination of those really,
Speaker 1: and it's also, yeah, the intensity of the light behind
Speaker 1: it can help, uh indicate what color it's supposed to be.
Speaker 1: And it's the fact that we have so many that
Speaker 1: we can actually represent colors other than red, green, and blue.
Speaker 1: This is using the additive property of color to get
Speaker 1: various colors. So if you had red, green, and blue
Speaker 1: light and you shine them all on a central spot,
Speaker 1: the very center of that's going to look white. It's
Speaker 1: that additive property where red and blue overlap. That's where
Speaker 1: you're going to get the purples. And it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: because if you think of back to um, you know,
Speaker 1: the primary colors, you'd say, well, wait a minute, now,
Speaker 1: I remember there was like red, yellow, and blue. I
Speaker 1: don't remember green being in there, and it's all very
Speaker 1: about what about cyan and magenta? Well yeah, And that's
Speaker 1: the thing is that we're talking about different approaches like
Speaker 1: light based versus inc based, additive versus subtractive you know,
Speaker 1: they're there are a lot of different ways of looking
Speaker 1: at color. And it just turns out that with televisions
Speaker 1: we're talking about the r g B. I mean, you
Speaker 1: probably have seen r GB connectors for various types of
Speaker 1: televisions and displays. So now we've established we've got all
Speaker 1: these pixels. The each pixel is divided into subpixels. Typically
Speaker 1: that's red, green, and blue. Uh, and those are what
Speaker 1: will determine the color of the image that you see.
Speaker 1: But what makes the difference between Let's say I break
Speaker 1: up my old inns and I look and I go
Speaker 1: to play Super Mario World or Super Mario Brothers, which
Speaker 1: was the first one, Super Mario Brothers Brothers. You're right, yeah,
Speaker 1: So there we've got a Mario that if you look
Speaker 1: close as pretty clearly composed of some squares. There are
Speaker 1: individually colored squares, and if you zoom in wag in
Speaker 1: on him, he's kind of spiky, like he's got some
Speaker 1: hard corners. But if you go to the next generation
Speaker 1: and play Super Mario Brothers or Super Mario World, I
Speaker 1: guess then on Super nes suddenly Mario is much smoother.
Speaker 1: And then if you go to the next generation smoother still, right,
Speaker 1: what's going on this is because those pixels. Now in
Speaker 1: this case we're talking about the capacity of the device
Speaker 1: to output pixel count, not not your television, but the
Speaker 1: NES and s and e s and these cases the
Speaker 1: same kind of effect, right exactly. H It's you know,
Speaker 1: the size of the pixels matter because the larger the pixels,
Speaker 1: the more you're going to be able to detect the
Speaker 1: individual pixels. And you'll see those hard edges because pixels
Speaker 1: essentially a little square, and if those squares are large enough,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be able to detect detect the corners. Like
Speaker 1: you were talking about the The example I always give
Speaker 1: is that imagine that you are given a bunch of
Speaker 1: wooden blocks of different colors, and you're told to create
Speaker 1: a picture using those wooden blocks, like show a representation
Speaker 1: of a car. And you've got some blue wooden blocks
Speaker 1: and some black wooden blocks, and the black ones are
Speaker 1: gonna be the tires, and the blue ones are gonna
Speaker 1: be the car. But you only have twenty blocks total,
Speaker 1: or the image can only be twenty blocks large. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be a really blocky car, like straight out of
Speaker 1: the mid eighties. But if you wanted to have something
Speaker 1: that had a lot more kind of smooth contours. What
Speaker 1: you would want to do is have the size of
Speaker 1: those blocks and double their number, and now you can
Speaker 1: make that same picture, but you're using twice as many
Speaker 1: blocks that are half the size. It's gonna look a
Speaker 1: little better. You do that again. It's gonna look a
Speaker 1: little better. You do this enough, and the human eye
Speaker 1: will no longer be able to differentiate the edges of
Speaker 1: those tiny blocks because they're so small. It looks like
Speaker 1: a continuous image to us. That's the basis for television resolution.
Speaker 1: You want to have as tiny a pixel as you
Speaker 1: possibly can and a high concentration of them in order
Speaker 1: for the image on the screen to be a high resolution.
Speaker 1: Um So, technically we could say that a television's resolution
Speaker 1: is the number of pixels that are displayed on a screen.
Speaker 1: And this raises another interesting point, which is that you
Speaker 1: can have two different TVs of two different sizes at
Speaker 1: the same resolution. They're gonna have the same number of pixels.
Speaker 1: But that means that the pixels on the bigger TV
Speaker 1: have to be larger because they have more space to
Speaker 1: fill up. So if you have a forty inch high
Speaker 1: definition television ten a d P t V. Then you
Speaker 1: have a thousand eighty lines of pixels going across in
Speaker 1: one direction. And I'll talk more about the directions in
Speaker 1: a little bit. But let's say that you've got a
Speaker 1: ten A d P eighty inch television. Well, your eight
Speaker 1: inch TV is twice the size, I mean, at least
Speaker 1: on the diagonal of the forty inch It actually gets
Speaker 1: a little more complicated than that, but it has the
Speaker 1: same number of pixels as that forty inch TV. So
Speaker 1: it's possible that something that looks amazing on a relatively
Speaker 1: smaller TV doesn't look as amazing on a larger TV
Speaker 1: if they're both at the same resolution. You have to
Speaker 1: increase the resolution of the larger televisions to make it
Speaker 1: that make the quality remain the same, right, or you
Speaker 1: have to back up further away from the larger pixeled television. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this raises another interesting point. We're gonna be nailing
Speaker 1: this sucker home as we go through this. The the
Speaker 1: quality of the image on a television is relative to
Speaker 1: many factors, the resolution of the television, the size of
Speaker 1: the television, and your viewing distance. Because the human eye,
Speaker 1: you know, our our our ability to pick out detail,
Speaker 1: decreases as distance increases, And of course for some of us,
Speaker 1: we have better vision than others. I used to have
Speaker 1: pretty crappy vision, and then I had laser surgery, and
Speaker 1: now my vision is normal. It's not great like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's essentially which is you know, considered normal vision. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's that's definitely a factor. All of those things
Speaker 1: are factors. So even the technological aspect of this is
Speaker 1: somewhat um mediated by the fact of how far away,
Speaker 1: like our physical surroundings, how far away we are from
Speaker 1: that television. If the TV is eighty inches and it's
Speaker 1: high resolution, like the same as that forty inch TV,
Speaker 1: but we're twice as far away from it as we
Speaker 1: were from our forty inch televisions, then things kind of look, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's rough numbers. I mean, that's not exactly the case,
Speaker 1: but it's it's you know, you get the idea. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is all stuff we have to take
Speaker 1: into account. So let's kind of look at what resolution
Speaker 1: really means. Now in the old days, we're talking about
Speaker 1: within height. I mean, we still are talking about within height,
Speaker 1: but the designation has changed a little bit. So the
Speaker 1: unit of measurement is the pixel. And if you were
Speaker 1: looking at a nineteen twenty by ten eight screen, that's
Speaker 1: one thousand pixels wide or number of vertical lines of
Speaker 1: pixels by one thousand eighty pixels tall, or a number
Speaker 1: of horizontal lines of pixels. And that's the resolution for
Speaker 1: a ten a d P screen. Uh. So the ten
Speaker 1: eight is all of those horizontal lines. That's important because
Speaker 1: when we get to four K, we no longer look
Speaker 1: at horizontal lines. We look at vertical lines because of course,
Speaker 1: we need to make this more confusing. Um that's my
Speaker 1: favorite thing about technology. Yeah, it's like when we decide
Speaker 1: the standard needs to be flip flopped, and we need
Speaker 1: to talk about this other number because if we talked
Speaker 1: about the first number, it wouldn't be as uh fascinating
Speaker 1: and exciting because it wouldn't be as big anyway. Uh.
Speaker 1: The reason for the difference, obviously, is that our televisions
Speaker 1: are wider than they are tall. So this has been
Speaker 1: the case for ages, although of course the aspect ratio
Speaker 1: has changed. We'll talk about that in a second. So
Speaker 1: let's start with standard resolution. There's still channels that broadcasting
Speaker 1: standard resolution. There are televisions that are displaying it in
Speaker 1: standard resolution resolution. You might have a standard resolution TV
Speaker 1: in your home. UM, in the United States, standards resolution
Speaker 1: television is at four eight interlaced lines of resolution or
Speaker 1: four A d I, and that uses a standard called
Speaker 1: in T s C, So that's technically seven four pixels
Speaker 1: by pixels. Now, in Europe they used the PAL system
Speaker 1: p L and that is five seventies six I. So
Speaker 1: technically the European UH televisions were a slightly higher resolution
Speaker 1: than the North American ones. Um, both of these are interlaced.
Speaker 1: That's different from progressive. I'm not going to go into that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll just barely touch on it because that gets that's
Speaker 1: almost an entire episode all on its own. UM. So
Speaker 1: then we moved to high definition resolution. Now, do you
Speaker 1: guys remember when HDTV was first coming out? Yeah pretty much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember it because I remember when it first came out.
Speaker 1: HD televisions were and they were crazy expensive like they were.
Speaker 1: They were an order of magnitude more expensive than your
Speaker 1: average televisions. And of course this is also still in
Speaker 1: the era of the big TVs, right, like not not
Speaker 1: the flat screens. They still television still had tubes in them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I still have a television like that. Actually, I have
Speaker 1: one in storage. I don't have one actively being used
Speaker 1: as a television or display on my laptops, though I
Speaker 1: had one that I'm pretty sure Rachel made me get
Speaker 1: rid of together. Well, my only VHS player is attached
Speaker 1: to it. You're killing me here, forward thinking and Lawrence
Speaker 1: enjoying her entertainment on clay tablets. This is a weird
Speaker 1: discussion for me because my favorite way of enjoying a
Speaker 1: piece of visual media is a third generation VHS tape
Speaker 1: of something from the eighties. Yeah, there are plenty of
Speaker 1: YouTube videos that are directly taken from that kind of content.
Speaker 1: I know because I watched one just the other day.
Speaker 1: Computers are Humans? Are Computers are people too? Was the
Speaker 1: name of the program forty six minutes. Okay, but so
Speaker 1: but so high deaf. Yes, this is where we start
Speaker 1: off with twenty Uh that was the resolution and high
Speaker 1: definition we saw, which is one thousand pixels by pixels.
Speaker 1: And that's that's a really decent resolution if your television
Speaker 1: is you know, for the inches or smaller um, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's not terrible for larger than that. But
Speaker 1: that's really where where it's sweet spot was but then
Speaker 1: you also had nine, which was the you know ten
Speaker 1: a d P or I whether it was progressive or
Speaker 1: interlaced um and yeah, a quickside note on what exactly
Speaker 1: that means. Um Interlaced is the classic way that a
Speaker 1: screen updates its image. Okay, it was kind of a
Speaker 1: clever way for screen makers to get around the fact
Speaker 1: that they had this kind of relatively poor energy efficiency
Speaker 1: and and poor speed, uh like just just technological programmable
Speaker 1: speed of these older screens, um and and so uh
Speaker 1: like we were talking about the screens. Pixels are coated
Speaker 1: as horizontal lines, and the odd numbered lines would refresh first,
Speaker 1: then the even numbered lines would refresh. So the full
Speaker 1: screen would refresh as as relatively slowly as thirty times
Speaker 1: a second, which sounds fast when you say that something
Speaker 1: happens thirty times a second, but really your your vision
Speaker 1: is absorbing a lot faster than that. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: what we're saying here is that each of these is refreshing,
Speaker 1: uh like, you know, twice as fast, but the full
Speaker 1: the full screen you're getta get thirty because or maybe
Speaker 1: half as time is anyway, you're getting the full screen
Speaker 1: at thirty times a second because it's showing you half
Speaker 1: of the image. It's just every other line. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then it it switches very very very quickly. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then progressive scan screens are capable of refreshing the entire
Speaker 1: image at once, um, which means that the image updates
Speaker 1: twice as fast as an interlaced screens. Right, and so
Speaker 1: you get um, you know, better image quality for things
Speaker 1: that have a lot of fast moving action and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: especially in action scenes, it looks so much smoother. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So uh that's why you know, back in the HD
Speaker 1: days when people were shopping for televisions and ten a
Speaker 1: DP became kind of a standard because at first it
Speaker 1: was one of those things that was a premium like
Speaker 1: you know, you can find ten a d i uh
Speaker 1: television sets, but Tina Tina ADP were more expensive and
Speaker 1: more rare. Um. Now they are pretty much the standard
Speaker 1: for any h D that's above like. Um, now we
Speaker 1: get to what is being pushed as the news standard,
Speaker 1: something that's entering into the mainstream. And we, like I
Speaker 1: said before, we've seen this creep into uh television series
Speaker 1: for a while, like vary the various series offered by
Speaker 1: various manufacturers but now it's like that's the main thing
Speaker 1: that's being put onto store shelves, and that's four K.
Speaker 1: So four K is a type of ultra high definition.
Speaker 1: That's weird because I feel like I saw somewhere online
Speaker 1: that ultra high definite is actually different than four K. UH.
Speaker 1: You know, uh D has also has also been used
Speaker 1: to describe everything from two K to eight K. But
Speaker 1: uh part of the issue is also there are conflicting
Speaker 1: approaches to compressing and streaming uh D content. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about that towards the end. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: actually kind of indicative that this is still the very
Speaker 1: early days for ultra high definition UM. But you know,
Speaker 1: the the industry standard for four K is four thousand,
Speaker 1: ninety six by two thousand, one hundred sixty. However, u
Speaker 1: h D is actually three thousand, eight hundred forty by
Speaker 1: two thousand, one hundred sixty, so it's slightly lower than
Speaker 1: actual four K. Now, the reason why it's called four
Speaker 1: K is that if you do the math and you
Speaker 1: multiply the numbers of a ten eighty HD television and
Speaker 1: you you you multiply those together, and then you multiply
Speaker 1: that by four you have the same number of pixels
Speaker 1: in a four k uh D television, So it's four
Speaker 1: times the number of pixels even though it's not four
Speaker 1: thousand lines of pixels. Yeah. So so this is where
Speaker 1: this terminology really gets confusing, right, because one, it's four times,
Speaker 1: but it's not four k in the sense that, you know,
Speaker 1: instead of one thousand eighty horizontal lines, now you have
Speaker 1: four thousand horizontal lines. And to make it even more confusing,
Speaker 1: we're not talking horizontal lines anymore. We're talking vertical lines.
Speaker 1: We're talking about how wide the TV is, not how
Speaker 1: tall the TV is. And so, instead of taking the
Speaker 1: second number of that ratio, which is what we had
Speaker 1: been doing, you know, remember nine, now we're taking the
Speaker 1: first number, so the three thousand, hundred forty instead of
Speaker 1: the two thousand, one hundred sixty. Now do you think
Speaker 1: that this is a marketing ploy in order to get
Speaker 1: people excited about that bigger number. I think so, simply
Speaker 1: because maybe it's one of those deals that one it
Speaker 1: gets people more excited because it's a bigger number. To
Speaker 1: calling something twenty one six d P instead of four k,
Speaker 1: it starts getting really unwieldy as well. I think they
Speaker 1: should term it in terms of the number of photons
Speaker 1: that are being employed on each screen. I mean that
Speaker 1: would be a big number. I'd buy that. Well, you
Speaker 1: gotta multiply the two numbers together, your tone Abountain, Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's a big number. Well, then you'd really like
Speaker 1: eight K. A K has four times the number of
Speaker 1: pixels as four K, not twice four times the number.
Speaker 1: Because the the individual numbers seven thousand, six hundred eighty
Speaker 1: by four thousand, three hundred twenty, I mean that when
Speaker 1: you multiply them together, you will get four times the
Speaker 1: number of pixels from a four KTV or sixteen times
Speaker 1: the number of pixels you would find in a ten
Speaker 1: D H D cent. I'm not sure that this is
Speaker 1: how multiplication works. I would like to let the tell
Speaker 1: vision industry now that eight is not Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just just putting that out there. I mean, I know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think what I can say is I
Speaker 1: can see why there's confusion in the consumer marketplace because
Speaker 1: none of the numbers really make intuitive sense. I think
Speaker 1: it's all because these are the ways that the industry
Speaker 1: has agreed to market these sets, and that I mean,
Speaker 1: the numbers are meaningful, but it's just that you know,
Speaker 1: it takes them digging to figure out what exactly they
Speaker 1: do mean. I'm just saying, if I had had the
Speaker 1: opportunity like I would have totally called the next step
Speaker 1: up sixteen K, because again, anyway, sixteen nobody asked me.
Speaker 1: Shockingly enough, I am not the earworm in any television industry.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that the eight K is supposed to mean
Speaker 1: the number of vertical lines of pixels, but even then
Speaker 1: it's being um, it's it's it's rounding up because it's
Speaker 1: not eight thousand, it's seven thousand, six eighty, but seven
Speaker 1: point six K or seven point seven K if you
Speaker 1: want to just round up to the tent All right,
Speaker 1: So why does all of this matter? I mean, if
Speaker 1: the numbers are meaningful, what do they mean? Okay, So
Speaker 1: there are a couple of things we have to take
Speaker 1: into account. One of them is that they're meaningful in
Speaker 1: the sense that a higher resolution set can't has the
Speaker 1: potential of showing you many more subtle gradations of focus,
Speaker 1: so that you can actually see a lot more detail
Speaker 1: in images that your television simply was not capable of
Speaker 1: showing before. And this could be a big deal if
Speaker 1: you are a filmmaker. Um, it actually can mean be
Speaker 1: a big deal for a couple of different reasons. But
Speaker 1: the big one is that if I want to tell
Speaker 1: a story and I'm using the visual medium of film
Speaker 1: or video or whatever, and I know that my audience
Speaker 1: is going to be viewing this on televisions in the future,
Speaker 1: I want those TVs to have the resolution that is
Speaker 1: going to be capable of translating the visual ls my
Speaker 1: story as accurately as possible, especially if I'm the kind
Speaker 1: of filmmaker that really relies on on imagery to get
Speaker 1: across emotional impact or an important element of the plot.
Speaker 1: One of those things where you can maybe because the
Speaker 1: way the focus of the shot it has been uh composed,
Speaker 1: you see an element in that you might not even
Speaker 1: consciously identify, but it is an important part of the story.
Speaker 1: And then later you think, oh, yeah, I remember seeing
Speaker 1: that that shelf they wound up using later. Right. That
Speaker 1: goes back to the rule of if you have a
Speaker 1: rifle mounted on the wall, then at some point a
Speaker 1: character has to fire that rifle. Yeah, I believe that's right.
Speaker 1: I think you're right. So yeah, but this is this
Speaker 1: is one of those things like we just can't get
Speaker 1: the resolution to see guns well. Just the point being
Speaker 1: that if you if you are taking the artistry of
Speaker 1: visual storytelling too as far as far as you can technologically,
Speaker 1: then you need to know that your audience has the
Speaker 1: capability of actually seeing them. When I go through the trouble,
Speaker 1: I'd say, what it seems to allow for to me
Speaker 1: is a lot of added subtlety. Yes, not so much
Speaker 1: that you're going to be able to see big new
Speaker 1: plot points, but no, no, but well, I mean or
Speaker 1: an actor's performance. I mean, if you've gone to the
Speaker 1: trouble of getting a good actor and lighting them well,
Speaker 1: then being able to see that the subtleties in uh
Speaker 1: Walter White's face when he's having a complete mental breakdown beautiful.
Speaker 1: I mean, these are these are things that they can
Speaker 1: even if it's not like important to the plot, it
Speaker 1: could be important to the emotional impact of something makers made. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I I agree you will probably be able to see
Speaker 1: the image better and that that's a good thing. But
Speaker 1: on top of that, it also means that we can
Speaker 1: get bigger TVs without without a decrease in quality, because
Speaker 1: with the with these these tinier pixels with higher resolution,
Speaker 1: with more pixels in the in the frame, you can
Speaker 1: go larger without having a perceptible decrease in image quality.
Speaker 1: You know, this just now made me wonder, and I
Speaker 1: didn't bring this up before the podcast because I just
Speaker 1: thought of it. Yeah, I wonder if this could lead
Speaker 1: to pixels ever replacing projection in movie theaters, so essentially
Speaker 1: having a giant digital television or display, rather than a
Speaker 1: screen upon which it reflects the light, you would have
Speaker 1: one that's actually acting as a giant TV. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying I think that should happen, the technology would have
Speaker 1: to advance really significantly, like incredibly significant. Yeah, because we
Speaker 1: don't have a resolution of television. First of all, uh,
Speaker 1: I know a lot of filmmakers who are still lamenting
Speaker 1: the death of film because film itself already has an
Speaker 1: effective resolution much higher than what our digital representation is
Speaker 1: capable of showing. But secondly, yeah, when you're talking about
Speaker 1: the size of a movie screen, even something like eight K,
Speaker 1: which is hard to even imagine on the scale of
Speaker 1: a regular TV, is not gonna be sufficient for the
Speaker 1: size of a movie screen. Um. That being said, you know,
Speaker 1: we are able to buy bigger and bigger televisions as
Speaker 1: prices go down. You know, the manufacturing processes get better,
Speaker 1: the materials get cheaper. Uh, the adoption gets larger, and
Speaker 1: we start seeing prices come down. There are people who
Speaker 1: have pretty big TVs and they're not necessarily increasing the
Speaker 1: distance there their viewing distance. If you were increasing your
Speaker 1: viewing distance, then you know those two elements together, the
Speaker 1: higher resolution and the increased viewing distance would mean that
Speaker 1: you would think your image quality was fantastic. Right, But
Speaker 1: we're sitting closer and closer. So if you have a
Speaker 1: huge television, a living rooms have not gotten bigger to accommodate. No,
Speaker 1: my mine certainly has not increased in size. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if we get a big If I get a
Speaker 1: larger television and I'm sitting the same distance it's away, uh,
Speaker 1: and it and the pixels aren't small enough, I will
Speaker 1: start to notice I can like see where the little
Speaker 1: differences are if and that can be distracting. So, but
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's most important that I don't know.
Speaker 1: Tony Stark is life size on your screen? Yeah? No,
Speaker 1: I want I want every human head on my TV
Speaker 1: screen to be larger than a real human head. I
Speaker 1: want to be able to pose it and stand next
Speaker 1: to the screen and tell who I'm shorter than. Oh,
Speaker 1: now see this would be important for Holidack technology. That's true.
Speaker 1: That's true. We got a thing needs to be life size.
Speaker 1: We've got always go. Yeah, you wouldn't want to have
Speaker 1: like all of the holiday figures to look like Mario
Speaker 1: from Super Mario Brothers. Would just be really distracting. Or
Speaker 1: even everything just be like seven eighths size. It would
Speaker 1: be real weird, Like that would be creepy. Everyone's slightly
Speaker 1: shorter than they need to be. But that's how real
Speaker 1: movie stars actually are. If you see them their seventh
Speaker 1: seven eighths of what you predicted. Yeah, that's true. I
Speaker 1: was in movie and uh that was huge. It's enormous,
Speaker 1: and I actually this is all true. I was in
Speaker 1: a film and I turned to my wife after they
Speaker 1: showed my entrance and I said, I think I just
Speaker 1: scared myself. Uh yeah, it was not. It was not
Speaker 1: an accurate representation of who I am. Is what I'm
Speaker 1: getting at. So there are other things that matter besides resolution,
Speaker 1: and we definitely need to mention them because a lot
Speaker 1: of just like with cameras, where people start to really
Speaker 1: pun intended focus on how many megapixels there are in
Speaker 1: a digital camera, as ever not intended. Sometimes they slip
Speaker 1: out and I didn't realize I was making one. This
Speaker 1: time I stopped and acknowledged it. But yeah, megapixel count
Speaker 1: in a camera is important, but it's not the most
Speaker 1: or the only factor. Like you know, you gotta worry
Speaker 1: about lenses and all this other stuff and the quality
Speaker 1: of the sensor everything like that same sort of thing
Speaker 1: is true with televisions. The resolution isn't is not the
Speaker 1: only factor you have to consider. So one thing is
Speaker 1: color reproduction. How well does the television accurately reproduce the
Speaker 1: colors that are being displayed. So if you've got a
Speaker 1: television with really good color reproduction, then you know that
Speaker 1: you're seeing about as close to what was captured in
Speaker 1: the original device, whether it was film or video or whatever,
Speaker 1: as you can possibly get. I sometimes get the sense
Speaker 1: if you ever go into a store and look at
Speaker 1: all the TVs they're trying to sell that on those
Speaker 1: display models, they turn the color saturation way up to
Speaker 1: try to like or I don't maybe it's the contrast,
Speaker 1: it's something they do something to try to boost the
Speaker 1: intensity of the image. Well, you know, you're in a
Speaker 1: brightly lit environment with florescent lights, so it's not an
Speaker 1: ideal viewing experience. It's not the way most of us
Speaker 1: would be watching at home. You know, at home we
Speaker 1: often will have you know, we might have florescent lights
Speaker 1: as since we might be using those as light bulbs.
Speaker 1: But a lot of people like to watch and deem
Speaker 1: viewing conditions, and in order to get across the quality
Speaker 1: of a screen, they calibrate those to be as uh
Speaker 1: impactful as possible within the store experience. The other question
Speaker 1: to ask is are they calibrating them all fairly or
Speaker 1: are they boosting some of the more expensive units so
Speaker 1: that you would look at those and say, well, clearly,
Speaker 1: this one's better than this cheap one down here, so
Speaker 1: I obviously need to get this one, which they have
Speaker 1: done the television equivalent of applying an Instagram filtered two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's actually you know, there are entire blogs out
Speaker 1: there about various stores that have, uh have tweaked settings
Speaker 1: so that they give an unfair advantage to some of
Speaker 1: the higher end models than the lower ones, even if
Speaker 1: the actual differences are you know, negligible to the average viewer.
Speaker 1: Now that being said that, you know, there are TVs
Speaker 1: that are of higher quality than others and you can
Speaker 1: actually see it. Yeah, I don't. So I don't mean
Speaker 1: to suggest that all televisions are the same and that
Speaker 1: you're being cheated if you go to one of these stores.
Speaker 1: It's just one of those things that has been reported. Um.
Speaker 1: And and obviously unless you're there when they're calibrating the television,
Speaker 1: you can't really be sure. And you should keep in
Speaker 1: mind that the experience you get in the store is
Speaker 1: not necessarily what you're gonna get at home until you
Speaker 1: calibrate your television for your home viewing environment, right, And
Speaker 1: and that calibration, yes, so it includes the color reproduction
Speaker 1: and then also the contrast, which is another thing that
Speaker 1: Joe just mentioned. Yeah. Contrast is the difference between the
Speaker 1: brightest white colors on your TV and the darkest black
Speaker 1: colors on your TV. Uh. And here's we're gonna enter
Speaker 1: into another hazy element of the world of TV. And
Speaker 1: that's you probably have seen contrast ratios like so many
Speaker 1: thousand to one and you wonder what they mean, so
Speaker 1: does everybody else, Because there's not a standardized lang blodge
Speaker 1: here when it comes to contrast. Contrast is a real thing.
Speaker 1: You know, there are differences between the brightest and the
Speaker 1: darkest colors, and you want that just that you want
Speaker 1: that difference to be as great as possible, so that
Speaker 1: you can have as many different subtle variations as possible
Speaker 1: for that television to display to give you the the
Speaker 1: greatest range of potential images. But there's no agreed upon
Speaker 1: standard way of saying this, so comparing one television versus
Speaker 1: another is really hard to do. Even within a single
Speaker 1: manufacturer's series of televisions. It's hard to do, let alone
Speaker 1: different manufacturers. So just something to keep in mind, contrast
Speaker 1: is important. Then usually you can kind of tell that
Speaker 1: just from you know, if you want to watch, you know,
Speaker 1: have something really dark, put onto the TV, something that
Speaker 1: has loved scenes that are shot in dim or dark conditions,
Speaker 1: like any Batman movie, And if you can't make out
Speaker 1: the details the contrast, it's probably not that good. But
Speaker 1: if the contrast is really good, then you can start
Speaker 1: to see these details, all of those shades of black. Yeah,
Speaker 1: from deepest darkest black to just you know, my daily despair. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I have a question about aspect ratio. Are all the
Speaker 1: televisions that are being made today pretty much the same
Speaker 1: in terms of how they're physically framing the screen. Because
Speaker 1: those old blocky TVs, you know, your your CRT TV,
Speaker 1: your monitor had that that old four by three framing.
Speaker 1: And if you watch any movie made in wide screen,
Speaker 1: as most good movies are, they'd have this letterboxing format
Speaker 1: and have black bars on the top and the bottom,
Speaker 1: and then you've got your uncles saying, how do you
Speaker 1: get rid of them black bars on the screen. But
Speaker 1: it seems like most TVs I see these days are
Speaker 1: in the wide screen format. Are there any differences in
Speaker 1: how they frame the screen? Yes? Actually, so there's the
Speaker 1: sixteen by nine is the standard. Uh so sixteen by
Speaker 1: nine standard definition because there are standard definition channels that
Speaker 1: will um broadcast in sixteen by nine. It's interesting because
Speaker 1: they they stitched together two four by threes, uh to
Speaker 1: make that properly, properly, there's actually a split, not that
Speaker 1: it's perceptible, but that's the way behind the scenes that's
Speaker 1: working now. The sixteen by nine. The interesting thing there
Speaker 1: is it still not quite the aspect ratio that we
Speaker 1: get with feature films. So when we watch a feature
Speaker 1: film on on a wide screen television. Either there still
Speaker 1: needs to be a little bit of letterboxing, maybe not
Speaker 1: so much that you would really notice, might just be
Speaker 1: a tiny sliver at the top and bottom, or you're
Speaker 1: getting some of the image cut off. Um. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you guys ever had to watch a pan
Speaker 1: and scan version of a film. Oh, those are the worst.
Speaker 1: Those are literally the worst. Yeah. I remember the old
Speaker 1: version of Halloween that is turned into a pan and scan,
Speaker 1: the Mike Myers John Carpenter movie. Yeah, I think, well
Speaker 1: I think it was Halloween. I'm pretty sure it was.
Speaker 1: It could have been another movie. But anyway, what I
Speaker 1: remember is there are musical stings timed to when you
Speaker 1: see the shadow of the killer pass into the frame
Speaker 1: of the camera. But in the in the standard version
Speaker 1: that you could get on your VHS tape, you didn't
Speaker 1: see the shadow, so there just suddenly be a sting
Speaker 1: and nothing happened. Yeah, I saw. I remember the same
Speaker 1: thing with a lot of my favorite movies, like uh,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of of I'm a huge musical fan.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of big musicals that were made
Speaker 1: that use like super wide screen format, like the pan
Speaker 1: of vision type stuff, which was particularly awful for pan
Speaker 1: and scan because you would have uh they would frame
Speaker 1: it so that you would have two major characters on screen,
Speaker 1: but there'd be a third character in the scene who
Speaker 1: you'd hear but never see because they had to figure
Speaker 1: out where are they going to put the focus digitally
Speaker 1: after the fact. Uh. Well, the sixteen by nine means
Speaker 1: that we don't need to worry about that as much.
Speaker 1: It's still, like I said, not quite the ratio that
Speaker 1: we get with feature films these days, but it's way
Speaker 1: closer than four by three. So obviously that is really important.
Speaker 1: I don't know of anyone who's making a television set
Speaker 1: that's not sixteen by nine. Um, is that the next
Speaker 1: retro craze. It's like you've got people into vinyl, You've
Speaker 1: got people into four by three TVs. Well, there there
Speaker 1: are displays that aren't that do not conform to sixteen
Speaker 1: by nine, but they're displays, not TVs, so there's a
Speaker 1: there's a difference there. Display is meant to show specific
Speaker 1: proprietary content made for that display, as opposed to a
Speaker 1: general purpose device that's going to bring in all sorts
Speaker 1: of content from various places. Uh So, there are some
Speaker 1: other like I alluded to some challenges when it comes
Speaker 1: to making content for these types of displays, these types
Speaker 1: of television's. Uh, you know, we talked about how it
Speaker 1: is a boon for storytellers because now they know that
Speaker 1: the work they put into telling this tale with visual,
Speaker 1: astounding imagery can actually be consumed properly. But it also
Speaker 1: means that any you know, scuffs and scrapes and maybe
Speaker 1: subpar costuming choices can be seen much more easily too,
Speaker 1: shiny foreheads, for example. This is something that actually we
Speaker 1: sitting around this table are are relatively familiar with because uh,
Speaker 1: they shoot here in the office on four K cameras. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I've got powder in my backpack, I've got makeup.
Speaker 1: I'm not ashamed to say it. You know, this was
Speaker 1: a thing that came up, not not with resolution as
Speaker 1: far as I recall, but with frame rate. About when
Speaker 1: the first Hobbit movie was released and it was showed
Speaker 1: at the advanced frame rate. I can't remember how many
Speaker 1: frames per second, and so that was a different issue,
Speaker 1: but it was another way of seeing a more realistic
Speaker 1: version of what happened in front of the camera. And
Speaker 1: I remember lots of reviewers I never saw it in
Speaker 1: frames per second, but I remember lots of reviewers complaining
Speaker 1: and what they were saying the movie. For some reason,
Speaker 1: this way of filming the movie and and playing it
Speaker 1: back makes everything look fake. The props look like props,
Speaker 1: the costumes look like costumes. It looks like a community
Speaker 1: theater production. I I've heard it called the Mexican soap
Speaker 1: opera effect. That's really what I've heard it as. But
Speaker 1: when I saw it, the thing I thought was, it
Speaker 1: feels like I'm really there, not in Middle Earth, but
Speaker 1: on a movie set. Yeah, it makes me feel like
Speaker 1: I'm actually And that's one of the things about these
Speaker 1: these ultra high definition televisions too, is that it can
Speaker 1: feel like you're looking through a window. One of the
Speaker 1: scenes that I saw was just simply a tree out
Speaker 1: in the field, and it looks like you're looking through
Speaker 1: a window at an actual tree. It does not, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's very close to giving it depth to the
Speaker 1: point where it's it's not three D, but the clarity
Speaker 1: is so amazing that you're getting almost an illusion of
Speaker 1: depth just from the clarity, which is pretty phenomenal because
Speaker 1: you know, three D did not take off the way
Speaker 1: television manufacturers really hoping it would. And you also bring
Speaker 1: up something else that I should have mentioned with the
Speaker 1: other elements that are important with your television, which is
Speaker 1: refresh rate. So refresh rate that's how how often that
Speaker 1: screen is refreshed every second. And so you find a
Speaker 1: lot that are in one two hurts these days, and uh,
Speaker 1: those TVs are supposed to reduce motion blur, but it
Speaker 1: also can kind of give this sort of surreal effect
Speaker 1: to certain types of content. It's great for things like sports.
Speaker 1: I mean, it looks amazing, but it can almost look
Speaker 1: like a like a video game. To me personally, it
Speaker 1: looks like something digital when it was when it was practical,
Speaker 1: when it was three dimensional people hanging out. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: confirmed a lot of my suspicions about certain Hollywood personalities
Speaker 1: that I've thought were digital. Uh, now it's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And some people have just said, well, this is just
Speaker 1: the way things are going to change, and it's just like,
Speaker 1: you know, I just have to get used to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just one of those things where we're in a
Speaker 1: transition transition right now. It's just as when film went
Speaker 1: from black and white to color or sound was first incorporated.
Speaker 1: These were moments of transition, and if you live through them,
Speaker 1: they seem very odd. But if you are from the
Speaker 1: generation where that has now become the standard, that's just
Speaker 1: that's the normal thing, and everything before it just looks weird.
Speaker 1: So we just happened to be living through that transition.
Speaker 1: You know, I wonder at what point resolution stops mattering? Like,
Speaker 1: at what point is the resolution of a TV screen
Speaker 1: so good that it really is no different than looking
Speaker 1: at the same thing without a camera and and a
Speaker 1: digital medium in queen And Yeah, so you know, kind
Speaker 1: of along the lines of what I was saying earlier,
Speaker 1: like like, are we in the future going to have
Speaker 1: like thirty two K televisions? Right? Will it be an
Speaker 1: appreciable difference for our eyeballs? Because you've had people who
Speaker 1: have said that they looked at two cave versus four K,
Speaker 1: or four cave versus eight K, and they say, I
Speaker 1: can't really detect a difference. Uh, this is dependent upon
Speaker 1: lots of factors, the ones that we've mentioned before. So
Speaker 1: there's not a simple answer, right, I can't tell you
Speaker 1: that at sixteen K we will reach pixel saturation where
Speaker 1: it won't matter if we add anymore because that's too
Speaker 1: simple an answer. It's actually a little more complicated than that.
Speaker 1: One thing we need to remember is that the resolution
Speaker 1: also depends upon the pixel density, so the pixel size
Speaker 1: and the pixel density, and that again depends upon not
Speaker 1: just the resolution but the screen size. So pixel density
Speaker 1: of a forty in ultra high definition TV is greater
Speaker 1: than an eight inch all for high definition TV because
Speaker 1: the eight inches larger, so the pixels are spread out
Speaker 1: a little more, they're less dense. So we talk about
Speaker 1: density by p p I or pixels per inch. Uh.
Speaker 1: And if you are looking at various products on the
Speaker 1: on the market, you're gonna see a lot of variation here,
Speaker 1: and again it's all gonna depend upon the size of
Speaker 1: the screen and its resolution. Offset printing is three hundred
Speaker 1: dots per inch, so dots would be the equivalent of
Speaker 1: pixels in this sense. The dots are the individual elements
Speaker 1: that make up a printed image. Pixels would be a
Speaker 1: displayed image on a television. Uh So if offset printing
Speaker 1: requires three hundred dots per inch to be considered, uh,
Speaker 1: you know that that's the standard. Yeah, it's good. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be a good clarity. What would be a good
Speaker 1: one for displays. Well, the iPhone six plus has a
Speaker 1: resolution of four hundred and one pixels per inch. Difference. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it's just just the way it works out. It's resolution,
Speaker 1: but four hundred and one pixels per inch, and of
Speaker 1: course you're holding that at between ten and twenty inches
Speaker 1: away from your face. Ideally you don't have it right
Speaker 1: up on your eyeballs, but you also don't have it
Speaker 1: across the room. So you can't just say, well, four
Speaker 1: d one pixels per inch because that all depends upon again,
Speaker 1: how far away you are. So pixel density will depend
Speaker 1: upon the resolution the size of the screen. So a
Speaker 1: sixty five inch Ultra high definition television will have a
Speaker 1: p p I of about sixty seven point seven eight.
Speaker 1: And you're thinking, whoa, the iPhone six plus is at
Speaker 1: four and one and a a u h D television
Speaker 1: is at sixty seven point seven eight. But you are
Speaker 1: not standing I hope ten to twenty inches away from
Speaker 1: that sixty five inch television. Your your several feet further back,
Speaker 1: and so that density matters less because of the viewing distance.
Speaker 1: So you have to take into account the pixel density,
Speaker 1: the size of the screen, how far away you are,
Speaker 1: the size of the screen will determine the pixel density,
Speaker 1: but that also determines how far away you're gonna sit. Right,
Speaker 1: you're gonna sit further away, presumably from an enormous screen
Speaker 1: than you would from a smaller screen. You know, I
Speaker 1: wonder if it's always going to remain a thing that
Speaker 1: we like to sit across the room from a screen
Speaker 1: we're watching, because that's sort of the standard with television,
Speaker 1: and I think it it comes from movie theaters and
Speaker 1: from times when a household might have one television. But
Speaker 1: more and more I'm noticing in myself and and the
Speaker 1: way other people do things. We're watching things on devices
Speaker 1: that are right in front of our faces. A greater
Speaker 1: percentage all the time of the stuff we watched is
Speaker 1: viewed individually. And of course I still watch stuff on
Speaker 1: a screen across the room on TV, like with my
Speaker 1: wife Rachel, when we're watching something together, and that's kind
Speaker 1: of social. But I wonder if we'd reached the point where, well,
Speaker 1: maybe we just sitting next to each other and both
Speaker 1: watch it on a device at the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: I I don't know. I don't know what the future
Speaker 1: holds for that, but that sounds kind of silly to
Speaker 1: us now, But would it be silly in the same
Speaker 1: way that if you told somebody from the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: that everybody would have their own individual telephone that they
Speaker 1: would have for themselves and not share with the house.
Speaker 1: I think it also depends upon the content you're watching
Speaker 1: and the experience you want to have. For example, if
Speaker 1: I'm watching a big spectacle film, I generally want it
Speaker 1: on my bigger screen TV. I want to have that
Speaker 1: experience of seeing those big moments and being caught up
Speaker 1: in that and and uh, it's a little harder for
Speaker 1: me to appreciate on a smaller screen. Now. That also
Speaker 1: could be a generational thing. But there are there's plenty
Speaker 1: of content I like to watch on a small screen,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't tend to be the spectacle type stuff
Speaker 1: or the stuff where there's a lot of uh like
Speaker 1: complex cinematography. Uh. That being said, one of the things
Speaker 1: I read about was that if you hit about five
Speaker 1: hundred pixels per inch on a distance of about twenty inches,
Speaker 1: that's pretty much the limit for the average person's ability
Speaker 1: to differentiate the quality of the image. Like anything more
Speaker 1: than that would be a waste because you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to perceive it. So the equivalent of five hundred
Speaker 1: pixels per inch at whatever distance you are from the
Speaker 1: screen would be that would be the same limit. But
Speaker 1: that's the problem is that it depends upon how far
Speaker 1: away you are, right, So if you're six ft away
Speaker 1: as opposed to twenty inches, you don't need five hundred
Speaker 1: pixels per inch. It may be significantly lower than that.
Speaker 1: And once you reach that level for whatever distance you're at,
Speaker 1: there's no need to go higher. Not that that won't
Speaker 1: stop manufacturers. I imagine they will continue to do it,
Speaker 1: but um, but at that point you you will literally
Speaker 1: be unable to perceive the distance the difference, right, not
Speaker 1: the distance, but the difference in the two. UM. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe maybe other kinds of technologies will fall
Speaker 1: more into focus as the U as U as the
Speaker 1: pixel issue has kind of worked out, Maybe the color
Speaker 1: issue or contrast or frame rate frame rate will become
Speaker 1: the new big things. Yeah, no, I'm sure those will
Speaker 1: all be elements of it. I mean, obviously the three
Speaker 1: D didn't really take off, and I can understand why.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't want to have yet another thing
Speaker 1: to keep up with, just to watch television, nor do
Speaker 1: I think all of TV benefits from that depth. I
Speaker 1: don't really want to watch like Orange, just The New
Speaker 1: Black and three D. You have any desire to do that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's I guess they're idiots like me who don't want
Speaker 1: to watch anything. Actually, I'm okay if the three If
Speaker 1: the three D was built in as part of the
Speaker 1: storytelling from the beginning and it and it provides a
Speaker 1: useful element to the story, Uh, then I'm fine. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing. Like I could say, I've in joyed
Speaker 1: plays that have had minimal sets, but I've also enjoyed
Speaker 1: plays that I have had incredibly complex sets. And to
Speaker 1: me understand what you're saying, Yeah, but maybe you just
Speaker 1: haven't experienced the right film yet. That's always possible. To
Speaker 1: be fair, I do not go see films in three D. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just haven't met the right three D yet. But
Speaker 1: either way, I definitely wouldn't want to have to keep
Speaker 1: up with I mean, it's hard enough for me to
Speaker 1: keep up with a single remote in my house and
Speaker 1: I only have one because I've got one smart remote
Speaker 1: that controls everything, and yet it's never where I thought
Speaker 1: it was. Uh, and uh, I'm sure there's a gremlin
Speaker 1: that just moves the remote when we're not home, But
Speaker 1: I would hate to think like Becca's never home when
Speaker 1: I'm not home, it's me I break into his house
Speaker 1: to mess with his head. Should have given you that key?
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, So this is um. I don't think three
Speaker 1: D will ever really hit like saturation in the in
Speaker 1: the consumer market. But but that's the sort of stuff
Speaker 1: we'll see once we hit the saturation resolution where you
Speaker 1: really can't go any higher and have it make a
Speaker 1: meaningful difference. There's going to have to be something else,
Speaker 1: you know. I wondered before we came in whether there
Speaker 1: would ever be a trend back to any kind of
Speaker 1: analog way of receiving visual media, so so closer to
Speaker 1: a film experience and not a digital television experience, right,
Speaker 1: because you can look at projected film that way. So
Speaker 1: it's you know, you've you've captured the images on film
Speaker 1: through through shining the light on a photoreactive surface, and
Speaker 1: then you just shine light back through a copy of that,
Speaker 1: and it's all sort of an analog to analog experience basically, right.
Speaker 1: I I kind of hope so, because I I really
Speaker 1: enjoy projection in a in a home sense, it's a
Speaker 1: lot more difficult to set up because you have to
Speaker 1: create the screen and the uh, the setup. But right, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's something that I feel like I like better.
Speaker 1: But I'm not sure if I would actually be able
Speaker 1: to tell the difference. I can't be positive it's not
Speaker 1: just some kind of like idea based preference. Well, if
Speaker 1: we ever get to a world where film projection is
Speaker 1: just completely abandoned, that means we don't get any more
Speaker 1: Quentin Tarantino movies because he refuses to shoot on digital. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't like digital conversion. I I do. I
Speaker 1: blame Quentin Tarantino for for a lot of things that
Speaker 1: he says and does. But but but I really agree
Speaker 1: with him on on that one. I still personally have
Speaker 1: a very nostalgic concept of a film versus digital. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I do love I mean, I do love film, I
Speaker 1: really do. I also appreciate digital projection as well, but
Speaker 1: I can see the benefits and the and the pros
Speaker 1: and cons of both. The thing the other thing we
Speaker 1: talked about, Joe was just the idea of could there
Speaker 1: be some other technology that eventually supplants the way where
Speaker 1: you using display technology right now, something beyond the pixel
Speaker 1: approach to displaying images, And we don't know of any
Speaker 1: I haven't found any examples of anything like that, though
Speaker 1: there may be something out there I don't know about.
Speaker 1: If you if you've ever heard of a future analog
Speaker 1: or even just you know, any non pixel based display
Speaker 1: technology that that could be coming in the future, we'd
Speaker 1: love to hear about it. Yeah. The uh, the way
Speaker 1: I look at is that I think pixel based technology
Speaker 1: is going to be around for the near future, but
Speaker 1: who knows, Maybe in twenty years will be looking back
Speaker 1: and saying, well, this antiquated way that we were, you know,
Speaker 1: displaying technology, and now that we have this amazing color
Speaker 1: morph screen technology, why would anyone have ever used pixels? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the screen itself is able to create the images and
Speaker 1: there's nothing else that's you know whatever, we know, we
Speaker 1: don't know. There's no way of us to know. And Joe,
Speaker 1: you made a very good point when we had this
Speaker 1: discussion earlier, pointing out that if the technology we're using
Speaker 1: today continues to be reliable and cheap, then it's gonna
Speaker 1: stick around for a really long time, even if we
Speaker 1: come up with alternatives. Oh yeah, Like it will take
Speaker 1: a while for anyone to adopt a news standard considering
Speaker 1: that this one is so well established. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you can have screens that are they just look
Speaker 1: fantastic and they're pretty cheap, and they're they're using technology
Speaker 1: we already have, it's gonna be hard for something to
Speaker 1: upset that system. Even if you can make the case
Speaker 1: then no, it really does capture more the nuance of light,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's it's more like actually looking through
Speaker 1: a window. It only costs five thousand dollars more. Maybe
Speaker 1: it'll just be a window and and actors will come
Speaker 1: in and act behind the window and we call it TV. Ah.
Speaker 1: I mean that would explain I think that once we
Speaker 1: get like cloning like end and rapid aging under underway.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking that totally would explain why Crispin
Speaker 1: Glovers hiding out in the closet in my house. That
Speaker 1: would that would be a good reason. It would make
Speaker 1: it a lot easier for me to go to sleep
Speaker 1: at night, if that's actually the real reason. Anyway. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the biggest and most high resolution television that I saw
Speaker 1: while I was at c e S was at eight KO. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what did that look like pretty? It's pretty? Ya, I mean,
Speaker 1: is is enormous. I can't imagine like my house went
Speaker 1: hold on. Sorry to interrupt you, but what did you
Speaker 1: watch on it? Was it one of those beauty I
Speaker 1: I candy reels or yeah, what I would want to
Speaker 1: see on it is an old VHS tape from TV
Speaker 1: of an episode of night Rider. I'll look at the
Speaker 1: tracking marks on this. It's amazing the high resolution of
Speaker 1: of how badly this thing was out of out of whack.
Speaker 1: If you can't make night Rider taped off TV look good,
Speaker 1: what can you do? I don't you know, they're not
Speaker 1: miracle workers. The future again is night Rider. I'm just
Speaker 1: having the voice of Kit going through my head. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: the he was John Adams in seventeen seventy six. It's
Speaker 1: not exactly the same. Yeah, also appeared as a car
Speaker 1: very weird anyway. So yeah, that wraps up this discussion
Speaker 1: about Congress my goal. Yeah it was weird. Um So yeah, guys,
Speaker 1: that wraps up this kind of discussion about the future
Speaker 1: of resolution and televisions and what we are looking at
Speaker 1: in the near term. I'm interested to hear what you
Speaker 1: guys think about this. Do you think that two K,
Speaker 1: four K, eight K. Do you think all of that
Speaker 1: has actual payoff? Do you think of it as being like?
Speaker 1: Are are you incapable of perceiving a change in the quality?
Speaker 1: I used to be that way, but now I really
Speaker 1: can At least I can tell the difference between HD
Speaker 1: and four K. I could certainly tell that difference um
Speaker 1: with the larger screens between four K and eight K,
Speaker 1: I can tell a difference uh smaller screen four K
Speaker 1: versus large screen a K harder for me to tell
Speaker 1: the difference, But my visual visual acuity may not be
Speaker 1: as good as yours. So curiously here If you guys
Speaker 1: have had any experience with that, what you think about it,
Speaker 1: or if you have any other questions or comments, you
Speaker 1: can write to us. Our email just is FW Thinking
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works dot com and we've had a
Speaker 1: lot of people right in and we're really thankful for
Speaker 1: that and we want more, so please keep sending us messages.
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Speaker 1: to hear from you and we'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. For more on this topic in the future
Speaker 1: of technology, I'll visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to
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