Random Thoughts Thread

[Soldier Blue]

Man does anyone have At&t Uverse internet? It seems like the worst internet imaginable. It only works half the time. Its one of only 2 providers I can choose from since I live in a Town.

I mean Im just getting sick of getting screwed over by these 2 companies that seem to have a monopoly in my area for some reason.
Time to move to Austin

[KalessinDB]

Man does anyone have At&t Uverse internet? It seems like the worst internet imaginable. It only works half the time. Its one of only 2 providers I can choose from since I live in a Town.

I mean Im just getting sick of getting screwed over by these 2 companies that seem to have a monopoly in my area for some reason.
Time to move to Austin

2 providers seems to be pretty standard, honestly. And usually one of those two is garbage. If there's a locale with more options than that for broadband, I don't know of it and I'd love to move there.

[MrPopo]

I had the kittiest dream. I dreamt I had a third cat and I was taking them somewhere for a playdate with some other kitties, but I didn't have any carriers so I had to scoop all three cats together in a big hug to carry them, and one would keep wiggling out but people would help me get her back because everyone loves kitties.

[Stark]

I had the kittiest dream. I dreamt I had a third cat and I was taking them somewhere for a playdate with some other kitties, but I didn't have any carriers so I had to scoop all three cats together in a big hug to carry them, and one would keep wiggling out but people would help me get her back because everyone loves kitties.

I'm gonna try and dream this tonight, sounds great.

[KalessinDB]

everyone loves kitties.

You would think that, but (and I must stress, I am not making this up) someone called 911 last night because there were stray cats outside and she was afraid to leave her car. Don't worry though, she called back a few minutes later because a kind passerby escorted her to her apartment. Safe from the vicious, vicious stray kitties.

[MrPopo]

Sounds like you should have dispatched someone to put her down. Humanely, of course.

[KalessinDB]

Sounds like you should have dispatched someone to put her down. Humanely, of course.

The funny thing is, she didn't technically say she was all set/didn't want to see police... so like an hour later, one of my favorite deputies actually went out there to check up on her. Best part is, the deputy is an animal lover.

[Cronozilla]

I wanted to chime in on some of the 4K talk and BluRay and all that since I've been looking into it recently.

Here's a few things I've noticed:

The new format is already out. You can buy those movies and the players. I think they came out in March.

This is obviously a soft transition, and more like "BluRay Phase 2" than a completely new format. As far as I understand, the discs are just higher capacity/bandwidth BluRays anyway. The nice thing about the UHD BluRays (which I think is what they're called), is they're the same price. Essentially speaking, if you were buying movies with a 3D copy, they're about the same price as that, but instead of a 3D disc you get a UHD disc. You still also get a BluRay and a Digital copy. That's a pretty good deal. (We're talking $20-$30 for brand new releases. Which is standard fare)

The largest asset of these new discs is not the resolution. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to see more details, but if that's all they offered this "upgrade" wouldn't be worth the price of entry. These discs also have HDR color. Which means, you're going to see color representation closer to how movies actually look than you have before. And the difference is pretty stagnating.

They offer better resolution and sound too, but color is where its at ... sadly it isn't something you can't see online, because it's entirely dependent on your display device supporting HDR. HDR seems to be standard on UHD TVs.

In terms of resolution vs TV tech. The OLED UHD TVs are readily available by LG, and they're even front and center if you walk into a Best Buy TV area. Apparently, the LG OLED sets have a fourth color pixel for neutral white. The effect is you don't have color tones across the entire image. Looks incredible. The price is also not idiotic. The sets I saw were $3K and $5K, for 50" and 65". For a TV technology that is only now rolling out into stores, that's about half of what Plasma was at this point in its lifespan.

I could easily see OLED sets being in the $1500 range within a couple years.

As for UHD ... they're all UHD. Best Buy has moved all the sub-UHD resolution TVs in to the old CRT aisles. UHD has taken over, and step 2 is going to be make the price plummet. And my guess is that'll make them really affordable starting this holiday. (Even last year they had some UHD sets for like $800)

I hope more manufacturers jump into OLED to push that tech down faster, but so far LG is the only game in town. Samsung is making way too much selling people LED sets, that's for sure.

Just a note, 4K and UHD are not actually the same thing. And TV manufacturers have been using 4K for a few years to entice people, which is actually a lie. 4K (4096 x 2160), a cinema standard is actually higher resolution than UHD (3840 X 2160). I think technically now they've made 4K absorb and include UHD ... but that didn't exist before these new batch of TVs. UHD, much better term, more accurate, but less exciting to consumers, I think. 4K makes it sound new, UHD is just the next step in HD specification, like 720P to 1080P, now there's 2160P. I think in the future, we're just going to see more in the UHD standard, so it'll be like 2160P, 4320P, and maybe a 4320P-Wide (which would be 10K)

In other format wars news ... I bought a stack of Laserdiscs at my library's book sale. Best of all, they're mostly Don Bluth flicks. Check em out:

I'm pretty excited that I got these ... even though I don't own a player. I'm kinda bummed about the quality of the video on the discs, but I am very curious about running these through something like a PVM. That'd probably end up looking nice.

[TSTR]

yo nice animated LD finds

[Erik_Twice]

They might be worth keeping for the artwork alone!