Why people accept the lie, told by mass media, that digital it's perfect??? (1 Viewer)

[Rick Thompson]

There is indeed the idea that digital is perfect, and I'm not going to make the argument that 4K (though I don't have it; happy with blu-ray, thank you) isn't better than analog VHS. The problem I have is with the forced push from NTSC to digital over the air. Just about the only benefit I can see from all the equipment bought (and I bought as much as anyone) was the economic jolt it gave to economies in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

As for any benefit to me, well, I no longer have free TV because I live 60 miles outside the city and have trees. In the days of NTSC, I got all the local channels from two cities. Now, because digital is either perfect or not there, I get none. My local channels (and everything else) comes via DirecTV (cable broadband ain't coming), but because of the trees I can get only standard def, meaning I now pay for what used to be free. Actually, I get less, because in bad weather I would get fuzzy pictures via NTSC, but the channels were there. In bad weather with cloud cover, forget about any channels. Get great color noise, though.

And, of course, when the weather clears I DO get all those infomercial channels I never got before!

 

[Bryan^H]

CRT has terrific color and contrast. They also had geometric distortion and maxed out around 40” and weighed hundreds of pounds. On the whole, except for retro-gamers , I think everyone is happy to now have flat panel displays.

Absolutely. As an avid retro gamer myself, my 5 CRT's(I just picked up another one) are worth their weight in gold. CRT running RGB/Component/S-Video for any system prior to 1999 is the ticket.

 

[DaveF]

Absolutely. As an avid retro gamer myself, my 5 CRT's(I just picked up another one) are worth their weight in gold. CRT running RGB/Component/S-Video for any system prior to 1999 is the ticket.

I have a local friend who got into retro gaming last year. He got a little CRT, a classic Sony Trinitron IIRC. And an original 5200 to play old Atari games. And then he told me he bought a brand new 2600 game, because the retro scene crates brand new games for the old systems! But I haven’t had a chance to get over and play, yet.

 

[Alberto_D]

Not exactly. I refer about a prime VHS and for image details per megapixel. For example, a prime VHS (like SP speed recored from a prime DVD or prime Blu ray edition), will keep better details for a area of let's say 380/240 pixels, than a TV broadcast encoding could keep for the same space of pixels.
Also VHS is better comparing gradients, since the poor digital system here have tones we can count, in a scene with a flat wall for example. Banding effect curse...
This is comparing VHS to open TV broadcast here. Unless they improve the system. I notice some channels got a bit better ("less worse") this month but it's probably due better cameras or better master tapes for some films or atractions, novels.

For Digital mini sat antenna system (paid like cabble), some channels are trully ultra ugly, like MGM Gold here, already captured from a bad source (looking very faded) then encoded within crap band space, and finally looking abominable, specially when in motion, and super poor in terms of gradients, making for me worse and more anoying to watch than a prime VHS recoerded in SP speed from a perfect source and watched in a good CRT.

But even CRT now got a problem. The open TV signal will stop the analogic signal in a month or so, and the digital converter sold here already convert the digital signal to analogic in such way that tends to creates clipped whites. Now even my beloved CRT technolgy will anoys me, thanks to this curse, this evil fashion of dynami range rape.
They created a digital converter that manages histogran in a way specially designed to anoys me...

Even if i put CRT TVcontrast adjust to minimum, the highlights keep clipped, cause it already is this way in the output connection from the digital converter.
They are killing TV for me. just killing it... I don't know more what to do.

The winter olympic games, for ice skating couples, got many clipped whites for many camera angles. I don't like ice looking similar to scotilit.
I care about highlight details. I don't understand why the rest of the world don't care about.

This "scotchlite syndrome" everywhere today... really anoys me...

So, in Brazil...

VHS > DVD > Blu-Ray > UHD 4K

Do I have that right?
.