So tonight I'm watching a little HDTV at a local watering hole of well repute, over a beer or two (watching the budget). Now, I've been annoyed about this since really paying attention to HDTV at M's in back in Troy: as a trained digital photographer, I noticed that HDTV pulls a few fast ones on us. First of all is how fast action tends to be prone to the JPEG "compression blockiness" degredation inherent in highly compressed JPEG images and MPEG video transmissions. Think low-res video clips on YouTube. Most of all, for the sake of the illusion of clarity and definition, the image is WAAAYYY over-sharpened to the point of appearing harsh and irritating. A quick lesson in sharpening... Sharpening is the boosting of contrast between color boundaries. Take for example this unsharpened image that I took of the dancers a few weekends ago:



Let's take a look at a detail of the unaltered digital capture:



Now, let's oversharpen that detail a bit. One telltale symptom of oversharpening is the glowing halo effect between distinct color details, which I have pointed out:



See how the boundaries between edges take on a particular glow? Now let's see the entire image oversharpened, to appear as closely as possible to what I've been looking at on the HDTVs lately:



Now... the next time you watch a baseball game, notice how the same effect applies to the uniforms against the green grass, and et cetera with pretty much anything else HD. It's their way of amplifying the effect to make the image "pop" off the screen.

I dunno. Maybe I'm being a know it all. It's true that traditional televisions show about 200,000 pixels while HD's have damn near 2,000,000. I guess my point is that I resent having the wool of cheap digital trickery pulled over my eyes by doctoring the digital output (to the point of degrading the image) to extract every last bit of that "Wow!" effect.