Posted on 12/06/2004 11:15:57 AM PST by ambrose
One more reason to consider "full screen" vs. widescreen. Travel. When you are looking at a handheld DVD player or even one in the backseat of a car (or airplane headrest), it gives the "maximum" size image.
There is no widescreen standard. That 16x9 ratio will still result in black stripes on the top/bottom or left/right side of the screen at times. Some will have their aspect ratios "fudged" to appear to not need letterboxing.
Pioneer pitches LD as "60% sharper" than VHS. LD image quality is roughly comparable to standard 16mm film, VHS is roughly comparable to 8mm film. There are no home video formats comparable to 35mm or 70mm film. The pulse-FM data structure on an LD (unlike ordinary VHS/Beta), is defined to hold all the information present in the composite video signal. Depending on source material and the transfer to disc, LD is above live TV broadcast quality: For NTSC, this is 425 TVL (luminance lines horizontally for 3/4 of the screen width) and about 482 scan lines, compared to 330x482 for broadcast. For PAL, the numbers are 450x560 and 400x560, respectively. Compare this to 240x482 for good VHS (recorded, pre-recorded is probably less). Only recently have Super-VHS approached LD capability, and ED-Beta has gone even further with its resolution of 525x482. Of course, pre-recorded material is not widely available in these VCR formats. Even using S-VHS/ED-Beta to tape off-air still only reaches the 330x482 of the broadcast signal (400x560 in PAL countries).
Also:
NTSC discs: * 2 analog channels (last discs like this were made in the 80's) * 2 analog channels + 2 uncompressed digital channels * 1 analog channel + 2 uncompressed digital channels + 5.1 Dolby Digital channels * 2 analog channels + 5.1 DTS channels PAL discs: * 2 analog channels (last discs like this were made in the 80's) * 2 uncompressed digital channels
Complete FAQ here
Yeah. The fast forward on LD's was much, much better than dvd. And the CLV discs (the ones that were only 1/2 hour per side) had remarkable abilities. I had a disk with something like 50,000 pictures of airplanes. Again, pre-divorce. Never did see them all...
Still, DVD is, much better for lots of practical reasons, not the least of which is size and portability.
Reader's Digest subsribers would beg to differ.
Thanks... but what sold me on the LD format was that it offered letterboxing and digital sound.
And you can now watch an entire movie on DVD without going from side a to side b.
I had some LD's left after the divorce in 1997 and the used record store that sold them then was taking no new movies. None.
It has been in decline for quite a while. It is good as an odity, and nothing more. A few purists will pay big bucks for an original, but Laser Rot will probably take it's toll in the long run.
These things aren't 78's...
You haven't been to ebay lately have you?
Reader's Digest is the 'pan and scan' of the literary world. :-) Somewhere Dr. Bowdler is smiling.
Zoom doesn't seem to work quite that way as even the letterboxing will remain (albeit in something that does not look to be the right ratio).
Zoom should only be used to look at details in a scene (and only if a DVD has adequate compression).
Heh, heh. For me that is a BIGGIE.
I was a big proponent of Laser in the mid-to-late seventies. Seattle was a test market for the original Magnavox machine, and I was the only one in the stereo stores I worked in that sold any quantity. And I myself owned one the minute I had the cash at salesman discount.
But I am pragmatic about it. It's time came and went. There is little it has to offer over DVD. When the DVD was even talked about, I KNEW that laser was dead, dead, dead.
Anybody ever see the movie where pirates find booty and it contains a bunch of laserdisks and one of the pirates says something along the lines of "What good are these? You can't record on them."
That is what we usually got from customers back then. I would then ask them if they had a record player. 8^>
Not every movie collectors want are even available in LD. There have been many recent movies, i.e., LOTR trilogy that isn't offered on LD.
That's why I enjoy both formats. Heck, I even own DVHS that offers both video and sound in the best quality offered for home video today.
Lawrence of Arabia was not meant for television screens.
Some films I will only watch on a movie screen (even though it may be years between screenings).
Blade Runner is among those.
Some need the "size" to work properly. I found suprisingly that even the end sequence to Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers' The Party needs a big screen.
Perhaps home projection will work on some of them. I'll need to bring some to a friend's a try it out.
Collectors don't count...
I think that Fantasia also got cropped in one of the rereleaes.
"There is little it has to offer over DVD."
You underestimate the masses out there who are purists who want titles like the OT of SW or Hamlet. Those are the collectors who are still investing in the format.
Not to open any new can of worms here, but I used to sell RCA "needle in a groove" video disks.
Any comments... 8^>
"Some films I will only watch on a movie screen (even though it may be years between screenings)."
You must be left wanting for a long time...
And there there are the people who just don't understand the difference. "I hate the black bars - why do they put them there?" Grrrrrr.... You'd think now that widescreen TVs and computer monitors are popping up all over the chopped screen crap would actually be disappearing not proliferating.
"Collectors don't count..."
They're the ones with $$$ in their pockets to burn...
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