Analog man living in a digital age

warning, I'm about to get nerdy on you. Might as well start with a bang: I went to see Transformers yesterday. Strangely seeing a comic book movie isn't nerdy anymore, what was nerdy was what happened before the movie. Marcus Theaters played this drawn out video about how their new digital projectors are better than their old film projectors. They showed a quick physics video on light refraction and how they use what appeared to be Superman's crystals to "make the screen come a live." I was pretty sure they were using the same plastic screen that has never been, nor will be, alive. The ridicuality climaxed as a they said, "Moving to digital projectors is like going from vinyl records to mp3's."



A general "ahhh" aura came over the popcorn eating hipsters with their new iPhones - except for me, and here's where it gets nerdy, I was laughing out loud at this statement. Didn't anyone else see the amazing irony here? Didn't ANYONE else know that records are better than mp3s??? Apparently not. I made a vow at that very moment to spend the next 36 hours letting the world know that digital projects are worse than film projectors. I've been pretty lazy about this vow so I'm writing a blog and calling it quits.



Let me put on my teaching spectacles and start the lesson on digitalizing analog signals. Analog: Basically a physical signal. Analog signals occur in the real world. An example would be talking into a microphone. The sound waves from your voice vibrate a little plate in the microphone which makes an electrical signal. That electrical signal is made louder and pumped out to speakers. The electricity makes the speakers vibrate and makes sound waves again. Another example would be taking a picture on a film camera. Light comes in the lens and exposes a piece of film. You can take that film, blow it up, and print it as a picture. Digital: Taking an analog signal and converting it to computer-speak... basically 1's and 0's (1001001001010). You can then take that digital signal and convert it back to analog to be sent to speakers or printed to a picture.



Digital is good: because it can be stored smaller. You can fit 1,000 pictures on your digital camera card the size of your fingernail. It's also good because you can send it around the world on the internet.



Digital is bad: because it's less accurate.
Here's a diagram for the visual learners. The first pictures is the analog line, nice and smooth, exactly as the original signal was. The next picture you'll see a bad digital signal. It's choppy and does a bad job or matching the red analog line. The next two are better (higher bit rate) digital signals. The last one is getting pretty darn close to the analog signal - which is the goal of digital. To get so close to the analog signal that you can't tell the difference. Digital can actually do this now, our eyes and ears are only so accurate and won't pick up on the minor differences. You might be able to see this with digital pictures. You camera phone is probably 1 mega pixel. That means there are 1 million little dots in the picture that can be different colors. If you took the same picture with a 12 mega pixel (12 million dots) camera you'd see a much more accurate picture. In fact with 12 mega pixels you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a film and digital camera. It tricks your eyes but at the very best a digital camera will only be "as good" as a nice film camera.

Ok, back to the record vs. mp3 comment. It should be obvious that a record will be better than a digital signal - in fact people with crazy ears that want to hear absolutely everything swear by records. If you get the original record (used to make all copies of the record), play it through an $800,000 record player with a needle that will pick up an earthquake in China, you'll get the best sound. The rest of us have CDs and our ears wouldn't know the difference. Whats worse though, is mp3s aren't just a digital copy of an analog source, it's a compressed digital signal. It means they purposefully made it crappier (like the first or second picture in the diagram) to make the file sizes smaller. What would they do that you ask? Because they were invented in the 90s when your hard drive was 400 MB and you connected to the internet at 56k. It would have taken 5 hours to download a song off napster and this way it only took 30 minutes. So now that we have faster internet connections and huge hard drives, why do we still use mp3s?? Because you stole 10,000 of the little buggers in college and you don't want to do it again with a better format. They're "good enough" for the car or working out and they were free, so we keep them around. If you listened side by side to an mp3 and a CD you would definitely notice the difference.

Let me rephrase "Moving to digital projectors is like going from vinyl records to mp3's" to "Moving to digital projectors is like going from the best possible audio in the world to a crappy version of a pretty-much-as-good digital copy." That's what I heard in my head and that's why I laughed. The good news is that digital projectors aren't like mp3s - they're not a crappy version of a digital signal, they're the "you won't notice the difference" kind, but they're still not any better as Carmike was trying to persuade. Maybe the bulb and lens are better but that means putting film through a good bulb and lens would still look the same or better. The reason theaters are switching to these is because they don't have to have 2 miles of film shooting through a projector. They don't have to pay the shipping and worry about film burning or getting dirty. Basically we won't notice the difference but it's more convenient for them (like putting your whole CD collection on your iPod instead of caring around a trunk full of cases and disks).

So my final conclusion is this: If the quality is no different (or unnoticably worse) but just more convenient for the movie theater, then I want a cheaper ticket. Not a ridiculous video trying to convince me that their new toy is better.