Category: Tech

The Red and Blue on Blu

A review I posted on the Facebook group Cartoon Research:

The new Blu-ray collection of the classic Fleischer/Famous Superman cartoons comes with the classic question, “Was the baby thrown out with the bath water?”

I have compared the raw and scrubbed images posted on Hi-Def Digest, using the screens of two laptops PC’s, two desktop PC’s, and a tablet. The PC displays were color-calibrated with an X-Rite colorimeter.

Then in blackest night, where no evil shall escape my sight, I watched the Blu-ray on two video projectors. An Epson 3-LCD (45″/1.33 image) and a much more expensive, and superior quality, JVC D-ILA (60″/1.33). Both were adjusted using a Spears & Munsil Blu-ray test disc.

When comparing the captured frames on Hi-Def Digest, I think the better the quality of the display the less appealing the raw scans are for me. Being so very familiar with the limitations and imperfections of the previous releases of these cartoons, watching them in Blu-ray is a new and vastly improved experience, especially on the JVC projector.

The raw clips in the “Speeding Towards Tomorrow” featurette don’t make me think, “Wow, if only the complete cartoons looked like this!” In fact, it feels more like I’m watching a DC DVD that’s been scaled up. I’ll go even further and say that, for me, the question isn’t so much whether the baby was lost with the bath water. It’s more, “What if the cels had been scanned digitally, rather than photographed onto 3-strip Technicolor film?”

I would of course be very interested in seeing the Superman cartoons given the Archive Collection treatment, but right now I’m very pleased with what I bought for less than 25 bucks.

I mentioned an Epson 3-LCD projector. It’s an Epson EF12, currently on sale for $700. Work on a new patio should start right after — correction: before — Memorial Day. Once it’s done I’m hoping to enjoy some backyard movie nights.

My Superman Blu-ray review posted on Amazon:

The negative reviews are coming from a certain point of view that I feel borders on axe-grinding, about how every film restoration should be done. It’s a disservice to fans telling them to pass on this Blu-ray.

We are well past the early days of software that “threw the baby out with the bath water” by removing details along with blemishes and film grain, resulting in an overall softening of the image.

Be assured that Max Fleischer’s Superman on Blu-ray looks absolutely fantastic! It’s so good I can almost imagine the original cels had been photographed digitally 80 years ago, rather than the Technicolor prints being scanned for this release.

Code in the Node

My first hands-on experience with networked, time-sharing computers was an introduction to BASIC programming in a math class I took in my freshman year of college. The programming was interesting but, I admit, it didn’t grab me the way the hardware setup did — teletype terminals connected to a remote data center over leased telephone lines.

Technology Review explains the background on how this educational initiative began, exposing students to the future that we live in today, and the directions the program took later.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/20/1071291/learn-to-code-legacy-new-projects-education/

By April 1971, the network encompassed 30 high schools and 20 colleges in New England, New York, and New Jersey. All an individual school needed to connect were a terminal and a telephone line linking the terminal with the mainframe on Dartmouth’s campus (often the greatest expense of participating in the network, at a time when long-­distance phone calls were quite costly).

Netflix Cuts the DISCord

Netflix delivery of DVD’s by mail, 1998-2023

It’s official. As of September 29, Netflix will be a 100% streaming service, no longer renting discs by mail. This leaves what’s left of the physical media rental market to the Redbox kiosks.

The DVD division has shrunk over the years (it had $146 million in revenue in 2022, and $183 million in revenue in 2021, down from $239 million in 2020, and in Q1 of this year it took in $32 million, suggesting a further fall).

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-shutting-down-dvd-business-1235182150/

There was a local video rental business in a neighboring town that I used after moving here. The owner was a smart guy, and an excellent manager. Having no interest in video games himself, he made them a large part of his business nonetheless, and we rented more video games than DVD’s. The owner saw what was coming with Netflix and he sold the business in 2003.

The new owner was a “film person.” He wasn’t interested in video games either, but unlike the original owner he didn’t rent them. Then he removed the convenient drop-off box in the center of my town. This made late fees more likely, and after that stupid move he raised the late fees to a punitive level. The last straw for me was that the kids he hired to work behind the counter were obnoxious jerks. So I gave up, signing up for Netflix in early 2004.

When Blu-ray came along, I was surprised by how frequently they arrived from Netflix with damage that caused playback errors. Some of them were unplayable with scratches that would have had no effect on playback if they’d been on a DVD. This was surprising to me, after reading about the care that had gone into making the Blu-ray format even more durable than DVD. It certainly wasn’t. It’s been six years since I ended my Netflix disc subscription.

Notflix

P.S. How’s that for a post title? Combining “cut the cord” with Discord, the video gamer hangout where that idiot kid leaked top secret government documents. They were made available to him by idiot intelligence officials who apparently learned nothing from the Edward Snowden case.