Tag: Halo 3

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Wired Test – 720p, 1080i…What Does It All Mean

Chuck Cage at Wired has a good article on explaining all the numbers in HDTV.

He says: “A 20/20 human eye can’t recognize details smaller than 1/60 of a degree of arc. Don’t worry, you don’t have to understand that. With a little math, though, we can use this number to find the distance beyond which the eye has trouble distinguishing one pixel from another. It turns out to be 137 percent of the diagonal measurement of any 16:9 widescreen: around 38 inches from a 32-inch TV. So if you’re sitting 5 feet away, you’ll never notice the difference between 720 and 1,080 lines of resolution. But if you trade up to a 60-inch screen, that distance jumps to almost six feet. Better push the couch back,”

I wonder how many people sit 38 inches from their 32 inch TV? I have a 480i TV (read, CRT Sony KV-36FV1) and if I sit 42 inches away while playing Halo 3, I get car sick.

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Halo 3 – My 4.11176471 x 10-8

I don’t really listen to rock music that much anymore. My tastes in rock were formed by listening to KSAN and KYA in San Francisco during the late 60’s. When I moved to New York in 1975, I started listening to jazz.

Michael Jackson – Thriller

The last rock LP (vinyl to you kids) I bought was Thriller, when it came out in 1982. The New York Times’ John Rockwell praised the album in his review, so I went to King Karol on 42nd Street and bought it. You can still get the vinyl Thriller LP at Amazon.com.

So that brings me, 25 years later, to Halo 3. Still affected by the mass media, I read Ars Technica’s Halo 3 review and I pre-ordered it from Amazon.

DHL delivered it today. It’s my 4.11176471 x 10-8 contribution to Microsoft. That’s my $59.99 part of the $170M first day sales of Halo 3.