Posted on 10/27/2009 12:39:23 AM PDT by Swordmaker
ping to the interesting Mac news and to the discussion of the screen aspect ratio.
LOL...LAVA. I was shopping in a Food Wholesaler yesterday and spotted LAVA soap on the shelf and I bought a bar as a gag for my wife. Brodrick Crawford used to advertise LAVA on a B&W tv show called the California Highway Patrol and his tag line was ... ONLT ONE SOAP GET THESE HANDS CLEAN” which to this day is a cliche in our home...
Hubby has been pining for this one so I’ll have to make sure he doesn’t read this! He has to wait until after the first of the year but his whinning is getting bad enough that I can’t stand to listen to why anymore and if he gets wind of how much sense this makes I’ll never heard the end of it! HELP! LOL
16:10 is close to the Golden Rectangle but fails by just enough to make it feel wrong. I prefer not to waste screen acreage with black bands. I think a 16:9 movie should be shown on a 16:9 screen. I only buy 16:9 DVDs and won’t buy the 4:3 “full screen” versions.
Oh man you must really hate that most movies are shot in 2.35:1 and are encoded onto anamorphic 16:9 DVDs with lots of extra black bands in the MPEG stream :-)
So it's a very high-specced, brand new panel that's apparently not being mass-produced yet (since no other monitors for sale are using it). That must be expensive. How much of the base 27" iMac's $1700 retail cost does this represent? The closest existing panel for comparison, spec-wise, is the 30" IPS panel that Apple uses in their Cinema Display. It has the ultra-high resolution and size, but doesn't compete with the 27" iMac's panel for brightness, contrast, power efficiency, or color range. It's overpriced by today's standards at $1800, but not by much...And it's going to be available quad core?
I've been trying to figure out a way to stretch my screen to show them without black bands... so far, nada. So I just grind my teeth and bear it.
Yup. Starting now you can configure the 27" iMac with a 2.66GHz Quad Core i5 or a 2.8GHz Quad Core i7. Delivery in November.
Is there much of a speed difference between the two?
Oh man, are you sure you really want that? If you stretch your screen to do that, then you are actually distorting what the director actually made. They don’t encode the black bands just to be jerks, they do it because most movies simply aren’t shot in 16:9.
Notice in theaters that the previews play and the screen looks sorta like what you’d expect from a widescreen TV. Then when the feature starts, a lot of the time the curtains open up even more. That’s because they are going from 16:9 to 2.35:1.
That’s not mathematical randomness. The current “widescreen” movie format is the equivalent of taking similar anamorphic optics (i.e. the lenses that are used to make a standard 4:3 35mm film print project into a 16:9 viewport) and using them again to take the 16:9 to 2.35:1 (something like 4/3 * 16/9 = 2.37ish).
The reason they do this is because the movie industry always has to stay somehow “different” than home TV so that you have a reason to go watch stuff in their venues.
Up until the late 50’s, movies were 4:3, just like our standard TV sets. In fact a lot of the movies from the 50s and early 60s are available now on DVD where the “widescreen” version is actually a version of the real movie (as it was made by the director and seen in the theaters) with extra cropping added (removing actual movie content) just so that they make it fit in a 16:9 viewport because people who don’t know better think that’s desirable.
Then once TVs took off, hollywood was in a bind. They had to work to stay ahead of the curve in order not to be obviated. They had color before most people had color TV, but it was clear where that was going. They tried smell-o-vision, but that was stupid. Then they hit on the widescreen format as a solution to keep the mystique of the theater alive. A rectangular aspect ratio does mimic more closely the real human perception, and in the early days of color TV, sets were small enough that there was no way that folks would suffer gladly any sacrifice of screen real estate just to match a weird aspect ratio. Plus, if you were going to make a CRT into a rectangular viewport it necessarily meant that you were wasting otherwise usable space.
The people who experimented with different widescreen formats produced a variety of results. Some classics like “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” were shot in Cinemascope, which was about 2.7:1 (the Mexican Standoff at the climax of that film is thought of by many as the perfect usage of the format).
When they had to settle on a DVD format, they chose to go with DVDs in normal mode, with 4:3 aspect ratio, and an anamorphic widescreen mode with aspect ratio of 16:9 (1.78:1) as a good compromise.
But since hollywood still tries to make films that get you into the theater for a special experience instead of waiting for it to come out on DVD, they mostly film the good stuff wider. It’s just the way it is.
And the way you get to see those films on your computer screen or home entertainment center is to put up with some extra black bands in there making sure that the presentation isn’t stretched or otherwise distorted.
In my opinion, instead of getting mad at the pixels of display not being used for the movie, you should be mad as hell that they are actually encoding (and therefore wasting bits) on blank parts of the screen!
I’ve really enjoyed your posts. I’d add one other economic reason for wide screen. Wide screen movies are more economically feasible for theaters. You can fit more seats across, and don’t have to make the theater as tall.
Got the same problem. I just put Snow Leopard on my 3 year old, 20" iMac and it works like a brand new machine. Wife won't let me upgrade until that one is completely obsolete.
I’ve got the same one a White 2.16 Core 2 Duo w/3GB Ram and a white macbook with identical specs. Got the iMac refurb from Apple and the macbook brand new off Craiglist for 800 when they were 1200 new. They were anything but overpriced, I was buying new expensive PC’s it seemed pretty often, so it’s been a great value for me. They run just like they did out of the box.
For someone who can’t or has zero desire to “tinker” with their PC the value can’t be beat. I don’t want to know how my car runs either, I just want to drive it.
I just don’t “identify” with Apple’s advertising though, I don’t look like the PC Dork, but I’m sure I could take 6-7 of the Apple nerds at once. So much of Apple’s marketing is vomit inducing, I couldn’t make it through the whole 7 minutes of the new 27 inch iMac promo, so pretentious. LOL
I appreciate that, Dr. Kimball, and that’s a great point about fitting more people in the room.
I forgot to add that my main point in the original post was the reason I like the 16:10 format for computing displays is that at the end of the day, even if hollywood makes movies that are only 15 pixels high, when I am done watching their sometimes entertaining dreck and am back to playing with Quickbooks and Excel, and perusing documents two-up per page, displays that mimic the Golden Ratio will always work better overall.
Not until you get Grand Central Dispatch aware apps that can parallel process on multiple cores... then watch out. Things you want to do will be done before you start!
That IS what I get exercised about...
My preference is to watch the movie as the Director intended... not pan and scan. So for those oldies, I have no problem with 4:3...
then, of course, there's Cinerama...2.89:1
The AMD Radeon 5850 in the 27" iMac is faster than the fastest graphics card for the Mac Pro, the last generation Radeon HD 5870. Frankly, the selection of graphics cards for the MacPro sucks.
The i7 version of the 27" iMac is a very nice system. Frankly it is cheaper than any PC with similar specs. I had to go to a Cyberpower to match the price and even then, the monitor wasn't as a good (its a ViewSonic VA2626WM Flat 26" (25.5" Viewable) TFT Active Matrix XGA LCD Display 1920x1200).
Thanks for that information.
Thanks.
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