Price Of Lightbulbs

True

CO2 is involved - to state it as the only and sole cause would seem a little rash.

Possibly true, but what is not established is whether the costs of attempting to prevent such change are not going to be greater and more destructive than attempting to adapt to it should it occur.

Only if you swallow the party line...

The new PC lingo is "climate change" - global warming seems to have stopped.

The effects are not at all well understood.

Doing nothing (looking at the big picture) also currently seems to be preventing global warming.

Will it? That seems unlikely since the cost of swapping to the new technology is not zero. Every lamp fitting, or dimmer switch that needs to be replaced erodes the energy saving.

There are a multitude of downsides - frequently discussed.

Are you claiming you can't? Tell me why. You aren't suggesting people still use analogue?

No, its been five years since I worked with the BBC technology division.

With them being finished in the consumer space, they are no longer commodity items with commodity pricing. People who still want to use them can expect to go back to paying the specialist prices required to maintain a manufacturing facility with little demand for its products and all its overheads shared across orders of magnitude fewer sales. I worked for a company that produced high spec colour monitors before they were standard computer accessories, and prices ranged from £10k-£50k, which is probably where they'll go back to as more of the users who decide they _have_ to have a CRT baulk at the cost, and decide they don't really have to have one that much, and the numbers dwindle. They may well become unavailable at any cost.

but that's what people are watching on, so why does it matter? Surely you should be making it look right on LCD's?

On a slightly different subject, I was amazed at the work done to recover one of the lost Dad's Army episodes. The original colour videotape had been overwritten, but a B&W 16mm film version was found that had been made for sale to a foriegn broadcasting company. (Not sure if it was just a preview or if they only bought a B&W version, but there were no colour broadcasts at that time, even though Dad's army was always videotaped in colour.) The B&W film had been created in a unit which, crudely put, simply filmed a B&W monitor. It turned out that the B&W monitor was receiving a colour signal, which was very unusal as the chroma signal was normally stripped out from B&W to prevent some minor interference it can cause on the B&W screen. Anyway, by digitising each frame and carefully examining the chroma interference patterns by computer (imperceptable by eye), it was possible to restore the original colour to the B&W film.

This episode was broadcast in colour for the first time some weeks back, and looked just like a normal colour programme.

Clever stuff indeed. I suppose the requirement that the colour signal was designed in such a way as to be backward compatible only extended so far as to not be noticeably visibly incompatible. The eye being happy to gloss over a tiny interference in the fine detail of the picture that was in fact the chroma signal.

In fact:

In article , dennis@home scribeth thus

They are bemoaning the availability of grade one monitors for serious broadcast setting up etc.

And as you say for PC monitor use LCD's are indeed very good but the needs of pro broadcast are somewhat different..

What is your basis for saying that GW has 'stopped'?

There hasn't been any for 10 years now, so they had to stop calling it Global Warming and invent a new name. Climate change is a good name, because the climate always has and always will change, so you've always got something you can worry about...

I was designing and prototyping distribution systems at the time Things like taking multiplexs apart into sdi and recoding and re-multiplexing them so they could be sent down broadband. There was a lot of quality testing done using very sophisticated equipment, not much by looking at the monitors. I have never been in IT as such, I have designed and prototyped computer hardware, software, systems and networks (the sort BT runs or will run soon). The IT I have done is to get things done when the IT dept said they couldn't do it, like installing ethernet in the days prior to TCP/IP (which those of you that know about ethernet will understand).

In article , dennis@home scribeth thus

So you've never had to line up a camera chain then?..

In article , OG scribeth thus

Thats very simple!..

People like my missus.. And the man on the Clapham bendybus.. don't seem to understand it and -think- the weather should be getting warmer.

And as its been brass monkeys weather lately .. think its now stopped, the global warming that is;!...

Ah, the "because I say so" explanation from Mr Gabriel there.

Anyhow, back to Mr Rumm, what is your basis for saying it? Please don't say "Mr Gabriel says so".

They used to employ technicians to do that, then they started to use electronics didn't they?

I'm fascinated by this. I know *nothing* about this kind of setup. If I understand correctly, you are trying to set up the response curves for the camera correctly - so half bright *is* half bright, and so on. Surely this isn't done by relying on the Mk1 eyeball?

Andy

In a chaotic system many of the inputs have no real effect at all.

Our problem is we don't know which inputs *will* have real effect. We're lacking controls for this experiment.

Andy

What was that - designing new paper clips? You certainly never visited a racks area - or understood what it did.

But which LCD? No two are the same. And what about those who use plasmas? DLP? OLED when it arrives?

Your argument is a common one with accountants in broadcasting - why use a

Most BBC programmes like this were telerecorded as a backup to either 16 or 35mm B&W film. And as you say the system is essentially a film camera looking at a monitor - albeit a rather special one. And they simply didn't bother retrospectively fitting subcarrier traps to these rather obsolescent machines as most wouldn't notice the chroma dots at home.

It was really quite impressive. Although I'm told a lot of work went into it, grading the results, etc.

Thames TV - before it folded as an ITV contractor - was working on an archiving system for colour progs by recording digitally to 16mm B&W film

- and the early results were most impressive. Film if stored correctly has a much longer life than pretty well any alternative.