Memory

On 03/05/2014 16:37, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
John Williamson wrote:
One reason for making it the size it is could have been that they may
have looked forwards (As engineers often do) and foreseen that the CD
drive could replace the 5 1/4" floppy drive in a standard computer case.
People also found it a comfortable size to hold and view the "label",
and that holds true for Blu Ray even now.

That assumes they realised it would be possible to home record a CD. I
don't think this was thought possible when the system was devised. As I
said, it was a replacement for LPs.

Do you not recall the fuss made over "multimedia" when it came to the PC?

(not your true multimedia as practiced on other platforms of the time -
where the computer controlled a multitude of AV devices, but basically a
PC with CD ROM and a sound card).

Apparently "you could now run applications like interactive
encyclopaedia..." and software released on CD would be "impossible to
pirate" since they had so huge a capacity they were much bigger than
your HD, and you would need an impractical number of floppies to copy one.

The arrival of the CD writer kind of put the kibosh on those ideas (even
if the first single speed drive released was $15,000).

I remeber getting my first Toshiba 3401B CD ROM drive[1] (with caddy
load), and some PD software / "stuff" disks. It felt overwhelming having
650MB of stuff to sort through on a machine with a "large" 40MB hard drive!


[1] Just wondering how sad it is that I remember the model number 25
years later? Still it was chosen carefully so that I could share it
between platforms in an external SCSI drive enclosure (which I made from
a standalone IBM 5.25" floppy drive unit)


--
Cheers,

John.

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"Roderick Stewart" wrote in message
...

storage devices you can lose through a hole in your pocket

Or can "lose" in a pocket and forget that it's there. My parents went on
holiday and my dad thought he'd lost one of the memory cards that he'd used
for taking photos. It was a precursor of the SD card - slightly larger area
and much thinner and so more at risk of snapping (SmartMedia card).

He found the card, in the back pocket of a pair of trousers, several months
later. In the intervening time he'd sat down many times, with the risk of
the card snapping as the trousers flexed about his backside, and the
trousers had been through the washer *and tumble drier* a number of times.

And the photos were still retrievable from the card. I suggested that he
threw the card away and bought a new one, once he'd copied the photos off
it, in case its life had been shortened.

Roderick Stewart wrote:

The modern drive to
make things as small as possible sometimes seems counterproductive,
with cameras so tiny you can't hold them steady, and storage devices
you can lose through a hole in your pocket.

If that's what happens, you should ask your mum to fasten them to a long
piece of elastic passing up one sleeve, over your shoulders and down the
other sleeve of your overcoat.

That's what mine did with my gloves when I was 5 years old anyway.

On 03/05/2014 14:18, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
It would still be compact compared to the LP it was meant to replace.;-)

And I still think of Compact as a television program...

--
Rod

On 03/05/2014 16:25, John Williamson wrote:
One reason for making it the size it is could have been that they may
have looked forwards (As engineers often do) and foreseen that the CD
drive could replace the 5 1/4" floppy drive in a standard computer case.

I have long assumed that all disc sizes were derived from standard rack
mounts. (With the odd exception such as the 3" drive used in some
Amstrad machines.) So I'd go along with that but maybe as a pre-recorded
CD-ROM rather than a rewritable device like a floppy?

'Tis a pity they didn't adopt a standard screw for fixing all drives...

--
Rod

On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 09:49:25 +0100, NY wrote:

I hadn't realised that the output from a camera is as high as 1 Gbps. That
really is a LOT of compression to get it down to 1-2 Mbps.

Bog standard HD-SDI is 1.485 Gbps. SD is 270 Mbps.

The biggest problem with digital TV is that it doesn't handle overexposure
very gracefully.

It's nothing to do with digital TV per se. It's usually caused by
cheap cameras with crap video processing and/or crap displays (i.e.
most LCDs).

Drama is usually well graded and the picture is perfect,
but a lot of documentaries, especially fly-on-the-wall types, suffer from
horrendous featureless orange skin tones or other bleached colour.

Because they usually use cheap small cameras, not proper broadcast
cameras. Such is the nature of shooting that type of stuff usually.

"polygonum" wrote in message
...
On 03/05/2014 14:18, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
It would still be compact compared to the LP it was meant
to replace.;-)

And I still think of Compact as a television program...



Sad beggar - but I know what you mean!


--
Woody

harrogate three at ntlworld dot com

On Mon, 05 May 2014 22:30:27 GMT, Paul Ratcliffe
wrote:

Drama is usually well graded and the picture is perfect,
but a lot of documentaries, especially fly-on-the-wall types, suffer from
horrendous featureless orange skin tones or other bleached colour.

Because they usually use cheap small cameras, not proper broadcast
cameras. Such is the nature of shooting that type of stuff usually.

It's not entirely the result of the type of cameras. Drama allows some
preparation before shooting, in the form of lighting and camera
settings, and retakes if it isn't right first time. With news or
documentary material, there's usually only one chance to capture it,
and no possibility of using a large crew, so camera settings that
would ideally be monitored and controlled manually have to be set to
"auto".

The first small television cameras used for drama (and by small I mean
something that only required one person to carry it, rather than four
to lift it onto a studio pedestal or crane) were marketed as ENG
cameras, the letters standing for Electronic News Gathering, because
that was their initial purpose. Unlike previous cameras they included
automatic circuitry for exposure, colour balance, black level, beam
current and registration, but could also be used with manual control
units as in a conventional studio configuration. For many years, it
was common to see both drama and documentary programmes shot with the
same cameras, any differences in quality being dependent not on the
cameras but on the way they were used.

Rod.

In message ,
writes

Seemed every bloody contestant on a TV quiz show back then when asked
what their hobby was answered HI FI. Usually meant they had bought
their first stereo turntable in Woolies and a K Tel compilation to
play on it.

ROFL! Very true.
--
Graeme