In article <BxzBzo.8o5@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> vaughan@feserve.cc.purdue.edu (jake vaughan) writes:
In article <1992Nov19.181328.20755@cs.ucla.edu> reiher@ficus.cs.ucla.edu (Peter Reiher) writes:
>>Finally, the picture
>> quality on a laserdisc is far better then anything that you willl see in a movie theatre. Take it from me, I have done my homework and laserdisc quality surpasses anything I've ever seen.
>
>Then they must have piss-poor theaters in your area. None of the laserdisk
>and big screen TV's I've seen demoed can compare with the picture quality of
>a half-decent theater. And a lot of theaters around here are considerably
>better than half-decent. The picture quality of the best theaters in LA
>make the best laserdisk player shown on the best TV look pitiful. As far as
>surround sound goes, I regard it as tertiary in importance, not even secondary.
>In addition to which, the best theaters in Los Angeles *do* have genuine
>surround sound.
The fact _is_ that a laserdisc image scans 425 lines of resolution
on a television screen (vcr is 250 for comparison) and a film at the
theater is being projected from a small piece of film and being blown
up to an enormous size creating a grainy picture at best. Sure, I
prefer a huge screen to a 40 inch television screen but I also prefer
a sharper image. An interesting fact about the sound at theaters is
that the sound is recorded on the edge of the film and to read it they
shine a light through this.
The fact that the big picture that you see on the screen comes out
from a tiny piece of film does not mean that it has to have a
resolution less than 425. I don't have the exact figures but I was
talking to a couple of friends who were doing some computer animation
for IMAX (whose film is basically three 70mm films) and the idea that
I got was that the resolution was at least an order of magnitude
higher than NTSC. (which is 425 scan lines).
Whatever light makes it through is transformed into sound.
Compare this to the digital quality sound from a laserdisc and you get
a low fidelity sound system.
Boy! you are missing out on life. You need to come to LA. Get a
theatre / movie with both THX and Dolby Digital (is that the exact
name?) and you will see what true movie magic is like.
