Seeing as I’m about three years behind, technology wise, I suspect this subject has already been discussed, What can I say, my TV is a 300 lb. crt deal and I still have a flip phone.
Anyway, I’ve just returned from vacation (yeah Chicago!) where I had a big ass HD TV in my room and it was my first exposure to it, if you can believe it.
I found it strange and somewhat distracting. Not sure how to describe it except it reminded me of the few Twilight Zone episodes where they used video( sorry, I don’t know the correct technological term) instead of the usual camera.
Everything seemed too bright and defined as to make it look fake. Am I just not used to it and I will adapt and like it better? I can see how it would enhance watching sports but I have to say, I do not need to see the topography of Mr. Letterman’s face in quite that amount of detail.
My guess is that the majority of you have been experiencing this technology for some time and may or may not remember your first impression, but I’m curious to know if you felt the same way.
With my first HDTV back in 2006, I found a good way to ease into watching it and appreciating the level of detail was to watch nature oriented shows, like Animal Planet or something that showed a lot of natural scenery. I remember being blown away looking at the grass, of all things and being able to distinguish individual blades of them. And that was in 720p!
Now I’ve got LCD LED 1080 sets and I don’t notice the details like that as much as I’ve become inured to it. But you sure notice it when you go back the other way and watch something in standard def on your HDTV or on an old CRT set. I can’t stand watching TV that way anymore, which is so weird to say given I grew up watching it like that for almost 40 years before I transitioned permanently to HD.
Holy cow; 2006. I’m further behind than I thought!
Finances have disallowed me to move into the 21st century but I now find myself in a position to get a nice , *current *television. I trust that I’ll get used to it but I just found it so jarring and not beneficial.
Will check in with you all when I trade in my Edsel for a Datsun!
Yeah, you really do get used to it. I’ve had my 1080p TV since 2006, 2008? I forget exactly. It was not awesome when I was stuck in the hospital for 4 days this last December with the old CRT’s still mounted in the rooms I had. It wasn’t just the cruddy picture, but that it was cut off on the sides for many shows, because those CRT’s are the wrong screen format for most of TV now, too.
The only downside I can think of is that for some shows and movies, if the CGI isn’t really good, then it looks really cartoony or fake. It’s a tradeoff I’m entirely willing to make for the rest of the benefits.
It’s very possible the TVs in the hotel were never calibrated and were still in what’s called “torch mode”. Torch mode is the default they tend to come in where everything is set super bright and very red/orange. It’s really only meant for the sales floor so that it’ll stand out in the store.
Also, if the shows you had looked like the studio lighting was weird, almost as if you were watching a soap opera or play, it was in Soap Opera Mode or Soap Opera Effect, another setting that can be turned off, that no one has been able to figure out why manufacturers turn on by default since it looks so awful.
Different networks can have varying quality of broadcasts as well. A network like ESPN, with lots of geegaws and doodad graphics all over the place tend to have really crisp, colorful HD, in my opinion.
I’m not a sports person at all, in fact, my TV has seen about 2 games ever, but I always tell people if you really want to show off how good a TV is, watch a sports game. Baseball probably your best bet. I stay away from football because all the back and forth can trip up HD, specifically anything that ends in i (1080i, 720i, but progressive can handle it better). Having said that, The Superbowl always looks great.
Oh, and I can’t speak for ‘regular’ football games, but The Superbowl is usually broadcast in surround sound.
Depends on the level. Like that HFR version of the Hobbit movies I hate. But just HD I’m cool with and was from the beginning.
However, if the picture looked odd to you in a hotel room it might also be that the settings were messed up too. I find lots of hotel room TVs have been fiddled with in weird ways and often the aspect ratio is screwed up.
Most people have their HDTVs badly over saturated with brightness cranked way too much up. Even if they are smart enough to bring it out of torch mode that was mentioned earlier they still often times are not adjusted anywhere close to reasonable levels. While it gives the picture a certain pop, it also makes the picture look unnatural. Often times manufacturers set the default color scheme and brightness like this to make up for poor black levels that cheap lcd and plasmas screens suffer from. I have gone through the trouble to properly calibrate my TV and it is a very noticeable difference compared to 95% of the other TVs I end up watching in one form or another. I think their is something to be said about the fact that you see a lot more detail that you may not be used to seeing, this you grow used too and even begin to appreciate pretty quickly. Going back and trying to watch sports in low resolution is horrifying once you grow used to HD.
This. It’s not a matter of not being calibrated or set up, it’s a matter of leaving them in “showroom” setting for exactly the same reason the showrooms do - it’s just So Big and Bright and Shiny! and (in some vague marketing-think way) makes the hotel and room more appealing.
This is also an issue when/if considering buying a floor or demo model TV, as the torch mode shortens the lifespan of the set and you have no idea how long it’s been sitting there on 24/7 in your local WalMart in that mode.
I’ve still yet to join the HD “revolution.” With my eyesight, I’m just glad to read the bottom scroll bars on CNBC, ESPN, etc. The TV in my room is a wide-screen Westinghouse which I bought because it was (a) Wide, and (b) less than $400. The main TV out in the living room is a 9yo CRT.
The two big issues that I found distracting when we made the switch were:
Spitting. I watch a lot of sports, and am generally aware that athletes spit, but WHOA SPITTING ON HD. Wow, there are a lot of details. (Which made me crack up at Joey P’s post – it is true that sports are a great way to illustrate the high points of HD, lol but perhaps also the low points)
Teeth. I was amazed at how many actors have only their front teeth capped.
In my unscientific study, which I call “Me, Watching TV,” I feel like more actors and TV personalities are aware of the teeth issue these days, because I don’t notice the disparity of front teeth so much. Really even in only the past five years.
Athletes continue to spit as much as ever, though.
I bought a 42" Sony HD LED TV almost a year and a half ago. The first thing we played was Alien. I bought the tetralogy before HD was a ‘thing’ (at least, before everyone had HD camcorders), so the discs are just normal DVDs. I was amazed and distracted by the super-real, ‘shot on video’ quality of the picture.
Turns out there’s an option in the Picture menu on the TV, where you can see the image that way; or you can set it to something that lets film retain it’s film-like quality. We never use the super-high resolution mode.
On a tangent, I attended the H.P Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhu Con over the weekend. My friend’s entry was shot on video, with footage from (in the film) 1932 shot on B&W super-8. He’d mastered the project in 1080. I knew he’d used actual film for the ‘vintage footage’, but I would have sworn he’d shot it on 16 mm. Even projected onto a big screen, and having been shot in a small film format on grainy Kodak Tri-X film, the image was great.
