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I absolutely agree with MaximRecoil’s feelings towards digital projection. All of the movies I’ve seen in theaters since the transition have had grey blacks. The last time that I brought this up on a forum, people just didn’t understand - “durr…you can’t get blacker than #000000”. xD
I’ve gotten the same response from people in forums. I think most people are so used to the poor black levels of digital displays now that it seems normal to them. In 2008 and 2009 I was working with my older brother Will in Arizona, and he’d gone out of his way to obtain a JVC HV-M300VSU (original MSRP: $4,519), which was one of the best direct-view CRT TVs ever made. The picture quality was stunning, even with relatively low quality video sources, such as 700 MB MPEG-4 ASP encoded “DVD rips”. In any event, when his highfalutin friends came over, all of whom owned the “latest and greatest” digital TVs, Will’s TV confused them. They marveled at the picture quality, the great contrast / deep blacks, and couldn’t understand why their TVs didn’t look like that. That was over 7 years ago, and most people had already been Digital Display Indoctrinated even back then.
In addition, I’ve yet to see any new TV technologies replicate all of the advantages of CRTs, including durability. Plasma has a slight fuzziness and wears out. Regular LCD has grey blacks. OLED is close, but also wears out. The closest is LCD with full-array RGB backlighting (edge-lit isn’t as good). Solid blacks, good colours. But CRTs still have better contrast.
A shame that SED never happened…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-emitter_display
This is funny, because it reads almost exactly like many posts I’ve made over the years. I was excited about SED back when it was first making news about a dozen years ago, and it is very unfortunate that nothing ever came of it. With that said, it still wouldn’t have been as good as traditional CRT technology in one area which is very important in my opinion, i.e., it is digital, which means it has a fixed resolution, and only video content which matches the fixed resolution of a digital display looks good (or as good as it is going to look on whatever digital display you’re using). Video content with a different resolution has to be filtered/scaled to fill the screen, which is ugly. The effect is easy to demonstrate on a PC with a digital monitor. Just switch Windows to any resolution other than the monitor’s native one, and see how crappy it looks. Multi-sync CRTs don’t have that problem; so on the same TV you can watch a Blu-ray or a DVD and they will both look as good as possible; no scaling/filtering artifacts whatsoever (because CRTs don’t scale/filter anything; they just sync to a different frequency).
BTW, Pretty much all films since the 90’s have gone through colour timing via digital intermediate. Modern vinyl records also tend to have gone digital at some step during production.
That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve long thought there should be an analog audio encoding format for optical discs. Several years ago someone pointed out to me that it has been done, but it never went anywhere. This is the link they gave me - http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue58/analog.htm
Of course, even if such a thing did catch on, the studios would probably still be capturing/mastering the songs digitally, which defeats the purpose.
With regard to projecting video, CRT projectors best approximate the look of projected film, but unfortunately, they are no longer manufactured, and they aren’t particularly suitable for commercial theaters anyway, due to their relatively low light output (lumens) and, because the 3 CRTs are driven at such high intensity in a projector application, they are very prone to screen burn, which isn’t good for a projector which would be in use all day, every day. They can’t be beat for a properly blacked-out home theater room though. The best one (which still commands a lot of money if you can find one), the Barco 909, is capable of 3200 x 2560 resolution and is good for up to a 29’ wide screen, more than enough for a home theater. The U.S. military stockpiled Barco 909s for a long time after they went out of production (they used them in their flight-simulators - https://www.barco.com/en/References/2005-02-07—US-Navy-MSAT-display-system.aspx), because they couldn’t find any digital projectors which would cut the mustard. I don’t know if they’ve moved on yet or not. They were also commonly used in planetariums.
