Since High Definition television and video has been around for over 10 years now, I decided that it was finally time for me to upgrade all of my consumer electronics entertainment equipment to the 1080p HD spec for movie watching, television, and video games. I figured that costs had come down a lot, and that most of the kinks would have been worked out in a decade.
To be polite, it’s just a complete clusterfuck, and one that really highlights pretty much everything wrong with modern consumer culture.
I’ve never really understood why consumer culture still operates, for the most part, like it’s 1950 out there. In spite of the internet, in spite of all available technology for researching products and features and so on, it seems like your average consumer just sort of bumbles through the vast majority of their purchasing decisions - to say nothing of their actual usage of products once they get them home. It’s like everyone is a bumbling 1950’s housewife when it comes to using technology. An entire society of confused senior citizens trying to figure out ATM’s, except they’re bringing it down for the rest of us.
The rest of this is that due to complete consumer ignorance and therefore lack of demand, “HD” is the most nebulous concept out there. It can mean anything from panned-and-scanned movies that have then been cropped and blown up to artifically fill a widescreen aspect ratio to 1080p Blu-Ray discs to just about anything in between. It’s become a marketing term that’s completely divorced from any actual semiotic meaning and attached to anything that it possibly can be attached to. This means that we’re just driven further from any sort of standard and can’t really trust anything.
For many of us, “entertainment” is a very important thing - it’s our Art in the same way that others love Opera or Classical Music. Just as you’d be upset to go check out the Mona Lisa only to find it having been “reformatted” so you can only see half of her face, it’s really insulting and discouraging for me to specifically subscribe to HD cable in order to receive HD content, only to find that much of it is bizarrely formatted in a way that compromises the original content.
I keep seeing movies that are now available in “HD” and I get excited, thinking that they’ve gone back and rescanned the original film print at a significantly higher resolution than was previous available. Instead, more often than not, they’ve taken an existing DVD or broadcast beta (or God knows what else) copy, blown it up so that it actually loses resolution and looks worse, and then unnaturally chopped it so that it’ll fit the widescreen aspect ratio. “HD” indeed - it looks completely horrible. The absolute worst that I’ve seen is when they’ll take a 3:5 formatted panned-and-scanned version of a movie that was originally in widescreen, then blow and crop the middle rectangle of THAT to create an “HD” version. It’s like going to the symphony only to find out that they’ve rearranged the Debussy piece for three vacuum cleaners and a kazoo for the audience’s “convenience.”
I guess this is a pitting, but it just makes me sad more than anything. Nobody gives a shit about art (even the art - yes, the Art - that is an episode of “Twin Peaks”) that’s also “Entertainment” enough to do anything about it, and nobody even understands the goddamned technology that they use enough to understood that they’re getting shafted. And it makes things worse for all of us, especially those of us that care.