The Factor in true HD…
The O’Reilly Factor aired from Washington tonight and it aired in glorious true HD. “What?” you say? “The Factor has been in HD for a long time now!” Yes, and no. As documented previously (and see imnotblue’s possible explanation in the comments of that thread), the Factor is in HD but it’s some weird morphing to HD which blurs the image noticeably enough for a videophile to spot it. Which makes tonight’s broadcast underscore the difference all the more. Odd that FNC’s highest rated program, Glenn Beck notwithstanding, still isn’t in true HD yet.
September 19, 2009 at 5:27 am
You know by giving INB a shout-out, this will only inflate his ego…
HOOORAY! HOORAY FOR MEEEE!
Okay, back to seriousness… I really hate morphing. It’s lazy, confusing, and a real recipe for disaster (relative to television tech, that is). Annoyingly, a lot of networks do it… if you’ve ever noticed some B-roll (soundless video that illustrates the narration), and then all of a sudden, the people in the video have wider-than-normal heads… that’s video that has been morphed incorrectly. It happens all the time on news programs (especially local news), and is a result of the process being very confusing, and mixing true-HD with morphed-HD.
Thankfully, as technology moves on, things get cheaper, and HD becomes more commonplace… this crappy morphed-HD will go away.
September 19, 2009 at 11:50 am
Good catch imnotblue. This really isn’t that much different than just 10 years or so ago – when we were always talking about converting from analog to digital, and then back to analog again. Remember that? Technology moved on; and now we have a much smaller, but still noticable, image quality issue we are talking about.