[LINK] Optus launches mobile film competition

[Tom Worthington]

At 08:16 PM 9/14/2006, Eleanor Lister wrote:
>... actually, the thing to judge is the viewing angle - try this quick quiz:
>
>- sit where you usually do in the room where your TV is
>- whip out your mobile phone and hold it as if you were watching a movie on it
>- close one eye and compare the apparent visual size of your TV screen ...

Yes. I get the ANU web students to design content for TV by targeting 
a business card sized QVGA screen on a PDA or smartphone. When held 
in the hand, that looks about the same size as a TV on the other side 
of the room <http://www.tomw.net.au/2006/wd/mobile.shtml#typical>.

An analog TV has only about the same resolution as a 320 x 240 pixel 
PDA screen. So watching video on a pocket size device is no worse 
than ordinary TV. I noticed this when watching highly compressed 
video clips downloaded from the web on my large LCD display 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2001/sa/lcdtv.shtml>. If I sit up close using 
it as a PC display, the quality of the video clips is awful. But if I 
sit on the other side of the room the same video looks fine.

All this shouldn't be surprising, as analog TV was designed around 
the limitations of human vision. There was no point in making the 
quality any higher as the average person would not notice the 
difference at normal viewing distances.

Of course this only applies if you are used to a "normal" size TV, 
not a huge high definition  home theatre screen. But I doubt that 
this will be the normal viewing mode in the average home.

Even if a home has a wall sized screen I don't think it will be used 
like a cinema most of the time, with one big screen showing one 
picture. Much of the time it will look like mission control at NASA, 
or an access grid screen, with lots of little windows of video and 
data <http://if.anu.edu.au/SW/VP.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml