TVs are bothering me lately. I’ll walk through the electronics department of the local Wal-Mart or Target, or through Best Buy or even a camera specialty store I visited a couple weekends ago, where one would presume they’re supposed to be experts on this sort of thing, and I see something that just, plain, BOTHERS me. And I don’t even know if anyone else can see it. The last time I asked, the clerk looked at me like she was begging me to stop squeezing the juice out of her brain.
So we all have seen the fields of flat-screens that are all showing the same movie at the same time, so that we might better comparison shop and appreciate the vibrancy of the color and play count-the-pixels. Really, even cheap TVs can deliver you a pretty crisp and bright picture these days, so I hate to complain because I grew up in a generation and an economic strata where it was not uncommon to know a family that only had one old black-and-white tube set with a fuzzy picture.
But every so often, I’ll find myself in front of two TV sets showing a movie, and one of them will look relatively normal, but the picture on the one next to it is…off. Maybe it comes from watching so many movies compared to TV, and watching so many movies in movie theaters, but the subtle distinction between film and TV imagery has sunk in with me, and I’m not just talking about that old hobby horse of photo grain but about the relationship of the colors and shades with each other, and the sense of depth in the frame.
Sadly, I don’t know enough about the technical side of how this works to identify what’s happening, but I end up with this uncanny sense that the movie I am familiar with, and which looks very rich and warm and movie-like on the TV set just adjacent to this one, just doesn’t look like a MOVIE anymore on the TV in front of me. It’s not an issue of resolution, it’s that it looks like someone shot the same movie with TV equipment. It looks artificially bright, and flat, and the speed of it seems even a little herky-jerky, as if we’re wobbling around that classic 24-per-second frame rate and only actually hitting it in fits and starts. The fact that it is coming from the same source as the flawless image on the other TV is what nags me.
I’ve seen this at multiple stores now, with major name-brand television sets which are quite expensive. And apparently, everyone working at the store thinks that whatever they’re showing me is supposed to be a dandy advertisement for why I should want to own this TV. This is why I wonder if I’m crazy or if other people are noticing this. I couldn’t ever watch a full movie like this – I think I’d claw the skin off my sofa. In the same way a tiny bit of radio static can gradually become an impossible irritant to ignore, I cannot handle that this doesn’t look right.
Nearly all modern televisions have pre-set modes for Sports and Movies and Video Games and all else. Maybe this is just what something like Sports mode does to a movie image; if so it’s startling to me how easy TV manufacturers have made it to spoil image quality – which ought to be the alpha and omega of what they’re selling.
Do some HD televisions, designed to broadcast the high-rate signals of modern digital cameras used for nearly all television programs, have a hard time translating the classic 24fps films? After all, they’re not presenting the films themselves, they’re usually presenting a standard-def DVD compression of those films, or whatever master the cable channel showing the film has been using for years. I don’t know who to ask about this. Hell, I don’t know if I’ve even adequately articulated the PROBLEM. Like the Judge said about pornography, I know it when I see it. If we were in a Best Buy I would happily point it out to you.
As this Onion A.V. Club article ominously describes, average consumers, given the choice between convenience, choice, and quality, are going with convenience hands down. What is bizarre is that, even though they clearly prefer convenience, they were snookered into investing so much money in fancy new TV sets that were sold to them as a symbol of cutting-edge quality for the technical connoisseur. If you can’t get 1080p like the Joneses, you’re a loser.
Is it added irony that it may not have even provided them that? Or is the whole thing just too sad for words?