Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Pixel Clear

Window screen makes the world digital.

I used to have a nice analog display monitor connected to my computer. It lasted for 6 years without any problems, but it gradually stopped working. My natural next step was to buy an LCD monitor with a digital hookup.

The idea of a digital monitor seems a good one. Signals from your computer travel to the display surface, uninterrupted by being converted from digital signals (inside the computer) to analog signals (inside the monitor cable) and back to digital signals (inside the monitor). Yet when I upgraded to an all digital flatpanel, I noticed that all the little defects that I had missed by running an inferior analog monitor ... were suddenly there before my eyes. It was as if the window that separated me from the pixels were dirty, and now I could see each individual pixel in crystal clarity. So clear, that I began to notice the pixels.

Playing back digital movie files has definitely become a traumatic experience on a digital monitor. I can now see all of the imaging artifacts in all of their ugliness. When I was living in the murky analog monitor world, everything seemed perfectly fine. All of the flaws and imperfections of the digital decoding were hidden by the analog display. The analog world was doing the digital world a big favor in the process, without any degree of thanks of course.

Now I see clearly in an objective sense, but I see less clearly in a subjective sense. What kind of clarity do I truly desire? I'm not sure.

Clay Moulton in Virginia comments, "I am a bit of an audiophile and the subject of fidelity is quite interesting to me. It seems there are two camps (within audiophilia): 1) Detail/fidelity/resolution over all else, as in Sound is better than Music, and 2) Musicality/pace/rhythm/timing over all else, as in Music is better than Sound. These two groups often wage battles when, say, reviewing stereo equipment, or musical recordings and it is usually very interesting to observe the intricate arguments posed by either side (sometimes typical science vs. art or the like). You raise an example of what I see as 'digititis' or when the resolution of an object becomes an irritant … most often this occurs when there is some sort of transcription from analogue to digital and back … a loss of fidelity due to a sampling rate or compression tactic."

Posted by maeda at February 28, 2005 12:00 AM