Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

480i content, CRTs, analog signal chains, non-digital transports, film grain, et. al., provide opportunity for our imagination to step in and produce a better interpolation than the ground truth might otherwise provide.

View on HN

Music doesn't need so much support from imagination. You could argue that 24 fps film is a good thing (I disagree), because special effects are expensive and the bad motion quality obscures the flaws, but the same doesn't apply with music. Every major city has an orchestra full of skilled musicians and a concert hall with good acoustics. Just record it as it sounds in the room and put it on CD. You can apply the same philosophy to popular music genres too. CD quality is good enough for this to work. The only imagination needed is to pretend that stereo audio is the full surround sound experience, and that's not difficult when you're sitting in the right position.

At least with CRTs, it's not just the imagination. It's the actual analogue interpolation creating a different image than the raw pixel-perfect without blurring/smoothing.

This video and timestamp comes to mind: https://youtu.be/2sxKJeYSBmI?si=ikuOuZl-Ho5_VK4k&t=1613

obligatory supplement: everyone used CRTs for monitors back then, albeit of different resolutions for PCs and for watching TVs. It's not like devs had to mentally simulate the effect.

There is the old quote "I like radio, the pictures are better"

> CRTs

Its only really recently that CRTs have been surpassed by modern screens in terms of colour.

However I'm not going back to CRTs anytime soon. Just a dumb OLED public signage display, and some high bitrate codec

You reminded me of how Marshall McLuhan called TV a "cool" (as opposed to "hot") medium.

My interpretation is that back in his day, TV was grayscale, grainy, and interlaced, and therefore demanded that the viewer exert their imagination to "complete the picture".

I imagine that if he were to see today's 4k full-color 120Hz panels, he would call TV a "hot" medium.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com