Personally I don’t really care much for all this HD stuff. Yeah the picture looks clearer and new movies look nicer when in HD, but really does it matter that much. When DVDs first started coming out I was blown away by the picture quality. I thought it was so great how clear it was and that you could pause the movie and it would still look crystal clear and that was just on a regular old tube TV. Recently my old non-widescreen, non-hd projection TV died on me. I really wanted to get a nice big LCD/Plasma tv but finances wouldn’t really allow it. I did manage to get another projection TV used and for a good price, only this one is in widescreen and has 480 resolution, and from what I have seen that is good enough and better in some cases.
What really started to sully my thinking about HD was watching Terminator 3 on Blueray No it wasn’t the fact that it was T3, which I actually enjoyed as a movie, it was the fact that when they were making that movie they weren’t making it for viewing in HD. Yes while watching the movie it was incredibly clear helped by the fact that my friend who is for lack of a better term and HD whore has apparently one of the best TVs you can get for a reasonable price. The whole time watching the movie though I couldn’t help but think that the movie just didn’t look like a movie. To me it looked like how when you were watching a TV show and they go to Disneyland, how the picture just looked weird compared to the regular show, it just took me out of the whole thing. Now I downloaded (heaven forbid) Avatar in HD and that looks amazing but that is because that movie was made for HD. When I do eventually get and HD TV and from the looks of it a Blueray player you can guarantee I won’t be out there buying Ghostbusters on Blueray because there is absolutely no reason for that movie to be upgraded to 1080 or whatever, at that point it just starts looking like a home movie. My friend (the HD whore) made the argument that now you can see movies how they were meant to be seen with HD. I call bullshit on this. The people making the movies are making them to be seen on the big screen with their limited resolution and motion blurring. You take a movies like the Bourne franchise. With all the quick camera work and “fight cam” stuff they did in those you can’t tell me that with the quick movement and fast cuts they weren’t taking into account that when presented on the big screen it would look a lot more intense with blurring and the like. I also watched a little of Beowulf on one of the HD channels that I get and it looked like crap. Now that was partly how the movie was animated but it probably had to do with the filmmakers expecting some of the quality to degrade when it is watched in the theatre/home. Now all that is changing with HD becoming more prevalent and with digital cameras but for movies made before these times DVD is probably better quality than is needed to get the best possible viewing experience.
Now to continue on the rant there is the whole video game aspect. Remember (some of you probably won’t) when the thing that made video games look nice was what system you had, not what TV you had. I do and it was a great time. Now you have games that are capable of playing in certain resolutions but apparently if you don’t have the right TV then according to some people you aren’t getting the total experience. There is even a group of people out there who are actually sitting there counting lines of pixels to see what resolution the game is being shown in. Now if that isn’t sad enough there are people out there that are getting pissed off if a game is only running at 640p rather than the 720p that it should be in order to be a true HD game. Really….REALLY…. come on people if someone hadn’t sat there and counted the lines would you have known. Especially in video games where it really depends on the developer how good a game looks. Whatever happened to just looking at a game to see if it looks good. Now you have to look on the back of the box to see what resolution it runs in, and even then sometimes you need to look online to see if that is the true resolution or if whatever system you are playing the game on up converts it to play at the resolution. It kind of makes me sad to see this. People were/still are bitching that the Wii isn’t in HD. When it came out I didn’t really care because I didn’t have an HD TV and I still don’t have one but I can now tell you that even if I did have an HD TV I still wouldn’t care because if it looks nice (and yes I believe that games that aren’t in HD can still looks nice) and is fun to play then it is a good game.
They just finally settled on 1080p being the standard so that us non early adapters can finally buy a new TV and not feel ripped off when the better one comes out next month. Oh wait now they are coming out with 3D TVs. I am all for the 3D TV but that is a whole other rant.
