Christmas in Hong Kong (12/30/98)

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After much vacillation I got a DVD player and I’ve run a few disks through it. My feelings are mixed. On the one hand the picture quality is obviously better, since bitdepth aka color information per pixel is very much improved, at least if you make the [considerable] investment in a television receiver with component video input. On the other hand picture quality is improved not in the slightest, since real resolution is just the same as it was before, or in 1939, for that matter, and you still have the abominable interlaced display. On the one hand the disks are a more manageable size, there are already at least a thousand titles out, and they’re not much more expensive than CDs [I’ve picked up a few at random, e.g. The Seven Samurai, La Femme Nikita, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Irma Vep.] On the other hand even at twenty bucks a pop what I would regard as the essential cinematic library would cost as much as a house. On the one hand you have the corollaries of the pure digital format, good freezeframe, slowmotion, random-access frame-addressability, features which didn’t usually work on classical laserdiscs, and you have [in principle] sound better than the theater. On the other hand this usually just means you waste a lot of time trying to get the right angle when the starlet pulls her shirt off, and I still can’t afford a decent stereo. — Some day [of course] they’ll go through the film library and rescan it at something like the resolution appropriate to thirty-five millimeter, probably something like 3600 by 2600 at ten bits a channel. [By comparison D1, the ceiling of video standards, is about 720 by 480 at half that bitdepth.] At that point, yes, DVD will scale and nothing else will, but, of course, none of the players you can buy now will play the disks. — But all this will take years, and meanwhile my videotape collection is rotting. So [on balance] what the hell. If I is someone else, whose money is this anyway.

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Pigs and Nazis (12/15/98)