Originally published at: High-frame rate analog HDTV from 1990 | Boing Boing
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I like the MC Escher-like sequence. Bit of a rip-off, but nicely done.
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She looked fine before the makeup… also she was 14 at the time, and you’d have a hard time convincing me that she wasn’t there as eye candy for crusty old exec types.
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I miss analog. While the last few years have seen digital 4k 60fps become something more normalized (more realistic looking and less shot on cheap 90’s video), the analog of the late 90’s early 2000’s gave a sort of true to life aspect to video. Kind of the same way physical film is able to capture motion in a similar fashion to the human eye. I realize the huge bandwidth needed for analog and why it had to make way for digital, but there’s always that lag where the new technology starts out not quite as good as the old. It’s just until OLED TV’s where I feel like CRT’s have truly been replaced.
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Interesting how, even with the high frame rate, the edge contrast on these images is extreme. It’s a trick that manufacturers used to use, on older LCD and Plasma monitors, to improve perceived clarity. It works ok on simple images but falls apart on things like rain or grass. A vast improvement over the analog CRT TVs for sure.
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Cosmetics are ideal for showing off that generation of hdtv-- the intended market is sensitive to minor differences in shade, saturation is valued, and some of it comes in powdered form, which is great for showing off resolution. The jewelry is great for shoowing off highlights.
Showing off cool swords being made and other manly stuff will have to wait until HDR is invented.
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The narrator is cringeworthy.
That was my year out from university, working at Sony’s UK broadcast research centre as part of my degree. They had a demo setup with film scanning, production switcher, and screening room that at the time were jaw dropping in quality. 36 inch perfectly flat CRTs that needed 6 people to carry them. And the 3D DVE processor was two racks about 30RU high each 
Part of the quality stemmed from the relatively light analogue compression techniques - no DCT blocking or weird motion artefacts. Fast forward to now, when I watch badly compressed standard definition Discovery shows on my 49 inch LG UHD TV… 
(tbf I do watch good quality stuff as well, but feel forever spoiled by what I experienced back then)
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I saw a HiVision (as it was called) demonstration set in Japan around 1990. It really was a striking improvement over every TV image that came before. You couldn’t help but be impressed.
The USA had been dragging its feet on HDTV implementation and standard-setting, but that worked to our advantage: by the time this country did get serious about it, chips to decode MPEG-2 were cheap enough to include in consumer TVs.
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didn’t muse blur moving portions of the image?
I had a local PBS station that was way too optimistic about how many subchannels it could squeeze into it’s ATSC allotment. So static images were breathtaking. As soon as they moved, however…
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I just reviewed the wiki entry on MUSE - as you can imagine, it’s a while since I worked alongside this kit!
They used some motion adaptive techniques to vary the sample rate of colour components to keep the bandwidth down. So yes, there were motion blur issues in play. I seem to recall that the production kit did not apply so much of the bandwidth reduction, so it may be that I was seeing much better quality than was delivered on the consumer playback kit.
I don’t think I ever saw an HD LD player in the UK…
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That music is so awesomely early 90s.
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Is VHS the new vinyl
You’re thinking of CED. At least one youtuber has released a five part series on its development.
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Foone on Twitter has done a few threads about them, also links a few of the YouTube overviews:
Mindblowing format idea
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THIS. Modern cable TV (at least in the USA) can go rot in hell. And I’ll include most of the internet TV services with that (like the free TV I get with my Samsung TV, not paid services like Netflix or Hulu). We were promised this utopia of 1080P channels with digital clarity and high definition audio for as far as the remote could surf. But instead a lot of my channels look like Real Player videos from 1999. It’s damn near impossible to watch America’s Test Kitchen in what appears to be 480P with 56k bandwidth.
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And it wasn’t possible to show this effect by applying makeup to an adult because reasons?
precisely. Whether these reasons have any importance is up to you.
Think it through, honey, think it through.
If you search for “makeup tutorials” on tiktok, do the results skew old, or do they skew young? And is something to fret over?
