the Masters on HDTV (merged) (1 Viewer)

[Doug Smith]

If anyone was wondering what all the fuss was about as faras HDTV programming was concerned, only needed to tune into yesterday's Masters golf tournament. You could see spike marks from the tower cam - even my wife watched because of the clarity.

 

[BrianAe]

Anyone that watched care to comment?

 

[Lew Crippen]

Stunning, mostly due to the richness of the colors, rather than the detail or the 16:9 format.

 

[SteveA]

The picture quality really varied a lot from shot to shot. Some of the cameras has very excessive edge-enhancement, resulting in thick blue haloes around all white objects.

 

[Patrick Sun]

I would have enjoyed it more if my reception would have been more stable (it kept fading in and out), but the local CBS HDTV feed has always been problematic, though I wonder if the higher temperatures had anything to do with my so-so reception. Every other HDTV channel was pretty rock solid.

As for the quality of the broadcast, it was pretty good and detailed, and you could definitely see a lot more putting green details (w/r/t undulations and grain of the greens).

 

[Trenton McNeil]

They had 42 HD Cameras there....the lower detail shots with over-edge enhancement were 16x9 SD cameras.

I was astounded by the quality, nearly as much as I was with Mike Weir's performance. A cool customer.

And, yes, my wife watched with me due to the clarity.

 

[PaulBoud]

Is that where the blue halo came from? I thought I needed to do a convergence. The color's were outstanding. The detail was good but not the best i've seen.

 

[Trenton McNeil]

The blue halo is introduced by edge enhancement combined with likely inferior imaging chips on the SD cameras. Its a common problem in digital imaging referred to as "Chromatic Aberration." This is one of the chief limitations of digital photography, by the way...

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

It looked great. But the director was having a torrid all-weekend-long, used-up-two-boxes-of-condoms sex marathon with a lens flare. Yeah it looks kewl the first two or three times, then you realize that it is an intentional part of the shot composition.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I enjoyed this year's HD broadcast much more than last year's, where CBS had a separate production facility for HD (including announcers). This year, viewers got the best of both worlds -- Augusta National's beauty shown in HD, and the excitement of the crowd roars, better coverage of the leaders, and field commentary. Last year's HD Masters sounded like it was being broadcast from someone's living room.