Films OLED TV permanently broke my piracy habit

I was able to get a DroboPro on eBay in 2015 (I think) with 11Tb in it already for $350. It's a decent bit of money, but not as much as many people generally assume. Since then, two drives have died and I have neared max capacity once, resulting in three new drive purchases in five years, which is about what I'd expect given the expected life span for the drives (I budget for one new drive a year).

I always buy the cheapest per Tb drive and I generally try to go as long as possible before upgrading since capacities and price are always dropping. With the way drives are going right now, I should be able to easily stay ahead in terms of capacity. I generally don't compress for anything I really care about (or if I just want to skip a step), but will often go to a modest compression for everything else. So far, it's been great.

There's the Harmy's Despecialized Editions, Project 4k77, another random 35mm scan, and a few others. Harmy's was the big one for close to a decade before these 35mm films were found. That one had people going so far as to repaint matte paintings. Again, they're transparent about their process, so if you disagree with it, you can decide not to watch that version or try to help find a better source so they don't have to go that route, or just try to convince them why that decision isn't as good as some alternative.

 

Harmy's really put me off the entire concept of fan remasters for a long time, actually, because I think they meddle too much. George's whole problem is he goes back to square 1 and tries to remake the film, inserting and replacing huge chunks of content. Harmy's does the same thing. No, the one I'm thinking of was a recent, huge effort to manually clean up, frame by frame, an original scanned cinema reel. The resulting file was pretty chonky, 25GB or so, and worth every byte. I was blown away.

THAT is what I honestly want a remaster to be - the original cinema image (not necessarily cinema edit), as clean and authentic as possible. But I know mine is just one of many contested positions on this subject.

Your logic is persuasive but it's the desirability of the end result that matters most to individuals. To me, as an individual - I just really like cinema. I like blu-rays (or physical media, at any rate). I like buying a film and collecting them on a shelf. I don't really mind that it occasionally creates horrible blips, like the Star Wars blu-rays or Ren & Stimpy vanishing. For the most part, this system is one I really enjoy partaking in.

Streaming services, not so much. And I shared some of the anxieties you've mentioned, when Netflix and Prime first came along, that streaming services would replace physical media. But they haven't, they're not. And I'm honestly not sure they will, now. It happened to PC games, granted, but the people who buy films are a different bunch. A very large proportion of them really value having physical offline copies of their films. I think the industry will keep providing that for the forseeable future. The desire to be able to create and cultivate a personal collection of posessions, one you control that never goes away, is deep and primitive, and will always be a part of how we enjoy films and TV shows.

I simply don't agree about the valuation of cinema, either. I think films costing as much as they do, being afforded the budgets they are, is a good thing. Spectacle is not the only result. Interstellar is my go-to example here. It's one of the best films I've ever seen, certainly my favourite film of the past 10 years or so, and much of the delight and wonder and insight it provides is directly due to the sheer scale and scope of its budget.

A budget is artistically neutral. Some creators will take it and produce 20 identical boring superhero films, bashing their CGI dolls together over and over again to make kids cheer. Others will generate 900TB renders of a black hole's edge to expand our sense of the scale of the cosmos.

Swings and roundabouts, innit? But the budget, the money, isn't the problem. Modern cinema's ills aren't a result of too much money being involved. Back when we all went to the local theatre to see amateur actors hash out the latest popular productions, there would, I'm sure, have been as much awful, crowd-pleasing brainless dross as ever. The ratio of Punch & Judy to Richard II, and the ratio of public demand for each, was probably similar to what it is now.

To lean even more positively into the modern industry: the existence of these huge studios and producers, their ability to amass large amounts of money from crowdpleasing dross fairly easily, directly facilitates other, less viable projects. Want to make a weird, gloomy film about the end of the world that has almost no box office appeal? No problem, just get Kirsten Dunst on board. She's a crowd draw, she's been reliable, and she has producer friends who like her. So that weird, unpopular, gloomy film (it's Melancholia, by the way) will happen.

Want to make a bizarre crowd-dispersing psychological drama in space, adapted from an obscure unreadable Polish novel? No problem, just get George Clooney on board and we'll find the money. Against all odds, Solaris will exist. Somehow.

These weird arty films are possible because studios and producers amass wealth in the existing system and can then take a little gamble on a comparatively little film. Many are flops. But once in a while, we get Solaris. Underrated and a box office bomb at the time, still unpopular and underrated now, but it exists, and I (and many others) love it and regard it as a cult classic. And that cult classic has all the veneer, polish and heavy quality of a premium product, instead of being a handicam made-for-TV piece of crap. Because of money.

 

Just want to pick up on Interstellar in particular.

Interstellar was not only a mind-blowingly amazing film, it also led to new scientific research. The black hole simulation & renderer that was developed for this film allowed at least two new scientific papers to be published. The film itself does take some liberties with black hole physics and time/space later on, but I honestly don't mind that.

One of the very few films I regret not seeing in the cinema.

 

In keeping with the thread, I would recommend getting an OLED TV and watching it on physical media

The missus insisted on buying it on blu-ray after we borrowed it from someone else. Quote, "we're gonna want to see that several more times."

 

I have it on physical media

Don't have an OLED though... My next TV will be a 55"+ 4K screen, and there's no way in hell I'm shelling out for an OLED panel at those sizes...

 

OLED ins't necessarily the panacea for picture quality issues.

The gripes in this thread (that aren't about copyright) are more aligned with "crap telly vs good telly" than LCD vs OLED. A well sussed LCD can run with any OLED terms of overall capability, making it more a matter of personal preference than one being better than the other IMO.

I think OLED gets an unfair share of praise simply because there aren't really any low-end ones out there - so Joe Public upgrades from whatever LCD was on offer at Currys in 2015 to any of the OLED screens currently on the market and it's a remarkable improvement - therefore must be because OLED. When in reality, spending that same £2k on a top-end LCD would have given the same wow effect.

Both technologies have their own limitations - I for one can't wait until I can pick up a large MicroLED screen without incurring the wrath of my financial controller.

 

Spend it on a decent beamer, 3-LCD, full HD will suffice

 

MicroLED is just a marketing buzzword, just like Samsung's "QLED". 'MicroLED' means "LCD with a FALD backlight, but with more discrete zones", "QLED" just means "LCD with and LED backlight that has a QD film in it somewhere".

 

Incorrect.

MiniLED I believe is the term manufacturers are going with to describe FALD-but-more

MicroLED is an entirely different story of individual LED pixel elements, so far only available at "if you have to ask" price points, and "won't fit in your house anyway" sizes for 4K arrays.

The 2019 model reportedly weighed in at $400k for a 146" 4K, the 2020 models should be a fraction that due to shipping in self-contained units for "TV" sizes (the 2019 consists of multiple panels that take days to install). But most fractions of $400k are still pretty big numbers.

Drool: https://www.avsforum.com/forum/86-u...093044-samsung-wall-owners-thread-2019-a.html