video games (was Re: UFCS for D)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:jl6a6a$1gh$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 3/30/2012 11:16 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Adam D. Ruppe"<destructionator at gmail.com>  wrote in message
>>> In my house's big room, I have a floor bed: a couple
>>> blankets and pillows on the floor, next to my big tv.
>>> (my "big tv" being a 20 year old 19" set! I'll use it till
>>> it dies. Then duct tape it back together and get a few more
>>> years out of it.)
>>>
>>
>> Finally! Another person that's not jumping on board the "If flatpanel HD
>> sets are so popular then I guess I have to go spring for one, too"
>> bandwagon!
>
> Dudes, get an HD TV. It really is transformative. And yes, it kills me 
> that my expensive old large screen standard def TV is just a POS in 
> comparison, even though it is in perfect working order.
>
> I can't even stand to watch standard def anymore.

I've seen and used HD sets. Heck, my sister has one (a fancy new one - 1080p 
of course) and I've watched stuff on it with her. BluRay, HDMI, all the 
bells & whitles, etc. Yea, the HD looks nice, but ultimately I've never 
gotten past the overall feeling of "Meh". YMMV, but it *honestly* just 
doesn't do much for me. Certainly not enough to blow hundreds of dollars on 
it.

And that's with HD content. A lot of my stuff is SD (and will never change 
to HD - it's not as if my Wii or XBox1 games/hardware are suddenly going to 
start outputting HD), and I've always found that SD content looks noticably 
*worse* on an HD set than an SD set, no matter how fancy the upscale 
filtering is. The upscaling/filtering artifacts are always painfully 
noticable and it just looks like shit. But it looks perfectly fine on an SD 
set. 'Course, the old HD CRTs would have been able to handle SD content 
perfectly fine, but you can't get those anymore.

So blowing hundreds of dollars just so half my stuff looks *worse* and other 
stuff looks (to me) only marginally better? Pass.

It's not like B&W -> Color. Just a higher rez. Meh, big deal. When it's 
commonplace to have inexpensive HD *with* extended gamut (sp?) and quality 
no-glasses/no-headaches 3D, and content to take advantage of all that (and 
without getting dizzy from all the shaky-cam bullshit), then it'll probably 
be enough for me to care. At one point I went from a 160x160 greyscale 
Handspring Vizor (PalmOS) to a 320x320 full-color Palm Zire 71. *That* was a 
significant difference. SDTV -> HDTV? Small potatoes, I just can't care.