I recently sat down with Scott to discuss how some types of 480i and 480p content looks on CRT’s and projectors. Unlike almost everything else we do on RetroRGB, this conversation is 100% speculation, with no comparison footage or facts to back it up. It’s legit just a podcast of us talking about what types of content we want to watch in 480i on a consumer TV, 480p on a BVM (or VGA monitor), or modern projector. And oddly enough, I think most people will enjoy it: Just think of this as a primer to get your started running your own experiments and seeing what you prefer best. As always, these long-form podcasts are available as a video and on all audio-only podcasts services – If you’d prefer to just listen, search your favorite app for “retrorgb scott”.
There’s one thing we didn’t try that I thought of afterwards: Those cheap HDMI to composite converters. Now, please note those are not recommended for gaming, as they output 480i and have quite a few frames of lag. If you wanted to run some of these experiments yourself, for $15, this might be a fun thing to buy…just please don’t use it for gaming ;p https://amzn.to/3KsERcY
Also, Scott asked that I leave some notes / corrections for things we discussed:
- The capture format for Shaka Zulu was 35mm, not 16mm as I postulated.
- I described the honeymooners as being archived by shooting a screen running an old ‘vitaphone’ video image. This is incorrect. This is actually the way they shot a lot of old ‘kinescope’ tv content of the era, but Jackie Gleason actually used a new contraption at the time, an electronicam, that used a beam splitter during image capture to simultaneously record the image on both kinescope tape and film at the same time, resulting in a much higher quality archival asset.
- The Dr. Stranglelove 4K aspect ratio is actually 1.66, not 1.7. Still wider than the 1.33 academy square aspect you thought it was, but I have been criticized before for rounding up 1.66 to 1.7, so better to be clear. As a matter of incident, the question of strangelove’s aspect is a pretty deep subject in film lore. It was shot in multiple aspect ratios (1.33 and 1.66) and released theatrically at 1.85, but Kubrick was always unhappy about that. There is an old dvd of stranglelove where different scenes have different aspects, and they switch on the fly (kind of like the films with parts shot for imax), but it seems now that everyone has agreed that 1.66 was the intended format.
