Free HDTV

[jagabo]

If you can't afford and HDTV just put up a few posters and pretend your SD TV is an HDTV. It will look sharper and better! LOL

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17930-think-yourself-a-better-picture.html

[lordsmurf]

This doesn't surprise me. People are generally ignorant about video. It explains why so many people claim VCD is "good quality"...

... and why some prefer "detail" (noise, grain) over a clean signal. (Remember the utopia discussion from the movie The Matrix?) It's "too good" to be "real" -- whatever that's supposed to mean!

I can show somebody a $5,000 dSLR with a piece of $2,000 glass on it, but when I mention it's 3MP, they seem to think their own P&S POS is better because it has 8MP. Nevermind that it's a plastic lens, cheaply coated, and with a tiny noisy sensor. Hey 8 is bigger than 3, somebody said that was better, so it must be so!!

You should go see that new movie, The Invention of Lying -- this fits in perfectly.
"That old TV set is actually HD."
"Really? Oh wow, it does look better!"

[greymalkin]

Remember the utopia discussion from the movie The Matrix?) It's "too good" to be "real"

That discussion hurt my brain..I had to watch it a few times to get my head around it.

"an impression backed up by posters, flyers and the presence of an extra-thick cable connected to the screen."

and Monster brand cables were born

[bendixG15]

From the link ..............
The results of the experiment might have been different had it taken place in North America, though, where conventional television uses the NTSC instead of the PAL technical standard. Picture quality is lower with NTSC, "so the difference compared with HD is much larger than for Europeans", says van de Wijngaert

PAL much better than NTSC ?..........I don't think I can agree with that but I'm only going by memory. Europen TV did not impress me with "picture quality"

[jman98]

PAL much better than NTSC ?..........I don't think I can agree with that but I'm only going by memory. Europen TV did not impress me with "picture quality"

I've spent a rather significant amount of time in PAL land and I agree with you. I did not personally find that PAL was "much better" than NTSC, only that it had higher resolution. Unless we could see 2 TVs side by side and do an on the spot A-B comparison, to a casual viewer I did not feel that PAL was significantly better in terms of color, which is one of things it supposed does "much better" than NTSC.

[edDV]

The major difference between Europe and the USA is smaller and fewer rooms. Europeans are less likely to dedicate a room for large screen home theater viewing (Baldrick excepted). The Japanese are just the opposite and will stuff a large screen into a tiny room. Result for Europe is smaller screens that are less likely to show as much HD benefit.

That said, there is little new in this article because they weren't comparing SD to HD. They were just suggesting SD was HD.