I'm getting a bit frustrated by some of the things the TV networks have been doing lately, so I thought I would start a discussion.

To start, I am annoyed with my DVR thinking there's a new episode of my show, only to find it's the same episode from last week with just an additional 30 seconds of the program smushed in or some commentary.

Or those 'First Look" things where I think I start watching an episode and it ends after 10 minutes because that wasn't really the episode which will air later in the week!

Anyone else have any pet peeves?

I'm annoyed with the news channels, and their perpetual countdown clocks on the lower right of the screen. 'We are 23hours and 6 minutes away from the polls closing somewhere'. 'In 12 hours and 34 minutes, our special on children in prison will air'.

The often spouted................."Another chance to see.......", aka another repeat!

Mid-season breaks. I'm looking at you "The Walking Dead".

And cliff hangers. I'm looking at you "The Walking Dead".
Just show who gets beaten and leave the reaction for next season.

Gambling ads in sport. You're off the hook here "The Walking Dead". Tom Waterhouse's smug little face just makes me want to change the channel.

TV has changed so much since the forms of my youth. Particularly: The old CRT sets had rounded edges on the perimeter of the screen. Special lenses were used on the cameras to compensate for the physical effect. It gave the image a 3D quality. You could almost see Barney Fife turning a corner as he walked off screen. Now all we have is flat screens and accommodating flat digital cameras. Okay, I'll grant the sound is better these days, mono then, stereo now.
But, it used to be colored TV. I don't know if political correctness killed the colored TV but all we get now are monotones and pitch black scenes.

Yes, the sound is much, much better. The picture is better in some cases, even when watching on an old CRT TV.

But what are you talking about here?



?????

What we get here, apart from most of the above, and a massive number of aged repeats, is ads which appear within the actual programme they are promoting. It is somewhat irritating to be be told to watch a programme that you are watching now.

Sorry to talk around you ren33.

gracious1,
Take the Turkey coup news coverage. All I was seeing were some black silhouettes walking past well lit light poles. Yeah, the studio scenes with commentators had some color (by expensive design) but what passed as live coverage was just movements of greys on black. They use amateur phone cameras so much as a source and those weren't designed to be enlarged (color definition is lost when you expand an image, like microscope images, captured images need special filters and additional coloring to make them not B&W).
TV shows are in the same boat. Many productions are using inexpensive cameras to record their scenes. The cost to the end product? Color. Take a show like "Sons of Anarchy". Many shots are out in the bright sunlight with motorcycles and eccentrically dressed characters which ought to be very colorful, but all you get because of the digital cameras is B&W. Yeah, the sitcoms still have color. Because they are shot in studios using the older higher definition studio cameras? In those cases you get the color but lose the laughter so they have to add that.
And forget movies on TV. They are mostly using the contrast between full color and monotones of blue or golds as mood setters to heighten the impact of the full flash of color. And the commercials suffer from both limited camera ability and editing room enlargements where they rake this bit over here and make it the central image (there's the expanding diminishes the color intensity phenomena again).

No, I don't find many Disneys out there presenting the "Wonderful World of Color".

mehaul, what happened in Turkey happened at night. Therefore, many of the silhouettes would be darkened. Cell phone video was all that was available. The news crews didn't have enough advance warning to go to the scene with a camera crew to film the mayhem.

If something is filmed or photographed in color and the negative or film is small it does not need special filters when it is enlarged to keep the color. It will not magically change into a greyscale film or photograph. That's impossible. For one thing different film is used to obtain a greyscale picture. Color uses a different type of film.

If you are see B&W when it should be color, you need to either adjust your television, have it repaired, or get a new one.

Sorry, you are wrong. Enlarging does diminish color definition. Just look at some of my Turquoise Microscope images here in the "Digital Microscopy" Forum. They are a pastel, paler version of the un-enlarged specimens. Filters add color but now the computer is used to manipulate the images (which I did not do to my images).

I know that the Turkey stuff was evidently shot at night but there were hours for Turkish camera crews to go out and record the mayhem. It lasted over 12 hours! I just used that as an example of so much footage passing as news that has no color, the point I made before. Film is hardly used anymore. The world has gone digital in the last decade.

They mass produce the CCDs and just install them into cameras rather than sort them first for best color capture. The big movie camera companies are beginning to make some CCD cameras that do make good color receivers (a popular one is the Red 'something' hand held) and manipulators (in the digital world, no filters are needed, it's all software). The only time actual film is used is well after a master image has been decided on and they need to make distribution copies for theaters. And many theaters are abandoning film for digital projection machines and canning the expensive film projectors. (I worked 2 years at a drive-In)

Please don't imply my opinion is wrong. You state your opinion which may be different but don't say, mehaul you're wrong in your opinion. As an example of my observation, I'll go to one of the recent films acclaimed for its use of color, "What Dreams May Come" and show a frame from a portion of the film where the director wanted to evoke a sense of cold and impossible sadness. He removed all the color from the "film" to achieve the effect. The scene where Chris (Williams) has almost reached his wife and he is in an upside down cathedral. See: Intentionally removed color.

As far as my viewing equipment goes, being legally blind, I need and probably have way better stuff than you do. And my opinion is formed from studying the science of vision for 45 years.

Mehaul, the television stations in Turkey were taken over during the coup. Not getting killed was probably more important to the news crews than filming what was going on in the streets.

I studied photography and film for four years at the School of Visual of Arts in New York City. I've never had a problem with loss of color when enlarging. I learned about film and digital. As years have gone by, ive taken more classes as photgraphy has changed over the years. Neither did my professors, many of whom were professional photographers, or classmates. What you are saying here is the first time over heard this theory. I've read a lot about photography over the years and never seen it mentioned. My experience is more than working two years at a drive in or doing it at home. Before you ask, yes, I have sold photos. No, I don't it any more and haven't for years. I still read about it though.

The thread is "Annoying Things The TV Networks Do...". Not things that mehaul says that annoy me.

I think we have a misnomer working. When I say enlarge an image, I am talking about MAGNIFYING the image, taking a 1x1 space and making it occupy 5x5 space and effectively reducing the definition by 1/5th.
I reference this point in the wiki article on "Magnification" under Maximum usable magnification: "With any telescope or microscope, or a lens a maximum magnification exists beyond which the image looks bigger but shows no more detail. It occurs when the finest detail the instrument can resolve is magnified to match the finest detail the eye can see. Magnification beyond this maximum is sometimes called "empty magnification"." I interpret 'bigger but shows no more detail' to mean it loses definition - of things like color intensity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnification

Under the article "Optics" we find (@ Photography):
"Exposure ∝ ApertureArea × ExposureTime × SceneLuminance
In other words, the smaller the aperture (giving greater depth of focus), the less light coming in, so the length of time has to be increased (leading to possible blurriness if motion occurs)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optics#Photography
I interpret 'less light coming in' to mean a less intense presentation of color that would be had at normal viewing.

Please don't belittle my work experience. You don't know what I learned from the experience. You may have been in school for years and 'learned nothing' is a possible scenario for your experience. What does selling a photo have to do with the discussion? I was employed by the US government and a Fortune 500 corporation to make physical dimension measurements for surface flatness using monochromatic light and special lenses called optical flats. One of my diplomas is in Metrology and I was trained and experienced in the field of optics from a Physicist's point of view.

Please back off on the Turkey stuff. I mentioned it as an example of news coverage that lacked color. I could have sighted (sic, I know, but the error is relevant) any of the recent eyewitness camera/phone footages the networks have used as 'news'. And News vans with cameras and microwave uplinks in Turkey have little to do taking over a TV studio. The action outside was that being recorded by just such professional cinematographers, even though I. me, said they were like phone camera product. At night, there is no light (color) to capture except for that reflected from available local sources, ie, street lights (which are monochrome in nature and effect). Monochrome means one single frequency of light. So, though there may be a broad spectrum of colors to be perceived, all that is captured are variations of the monochrome wavelength.


Addition: For a good presentation of the mechanics and methodology (or lack thereof) and how news is gathered, try watching the Jake Gyllenhaak vehicle "Nightcrawler".
My everyday carry around camera captures 20.1 megapixels which is twice the capability of the best definition cameras of just 5 years ago. And in a way, to follow on your train of thought, a picture I take today can be blown up to twice the size and still have the resolution of the older cameras. But on its own, I lose definition with every enlargement until you reach the limit where pixilation becomes noticeable as blocks of color rather than mere points of it.

Let me see if I can explain how we are differing on this.

Photo enlargements are a result of a projection of a negative from a distance farther away from the negative. If you take a prism effect (like on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon album cover) and you put the print paper 1 inch from the prism, you get a field of ROYGBV 1 inch high. If you move the paper a foot away, you do get the same ROYGBV field with no loss of color but at 1 foot high. The prism, acting as a projector does exactly what it is designed to do: project. A magnifier acts differently than a projector.

If you take that original 1 inch high image and magnify it, you lose some color definition because you are trying to show areas where the color wasn't defined before. Grey tones begin to show. If you magnify it enough, to say 10 feet high, you won't have hardly any of the original colors left to see. If in a pixel square space you have 300 points of 3.7 angstroms wavelength to emit and you magnify it 100 times, each pixel now only emits 3 points of light at 3.7 angstroms leaving the other 297 points blank.

Trailers on iPlayer.
I accept that there will be trailers scattered around off-air TV broadcasts. If I'm capable of going online and finding the programme I want to watch, do I need a trailer for a completely different programme?

Deafening adverts
TV advertising breaks in Britain are at most about four minutes long, which I think is shorter than American ones, but they make up for that in volume. However loud the programme is, the ads are twice as loud. And some adverts actually increase in volume, till you have to hope that the neighbours won't think of telling the police about the knocking or screaming coming from next door.
When I've asked the TV companies why they're so loud, they've responded with a string of sciency-sounding long words that are supposed to convince me that the ads aren't really louder, it's only my perception. Yes, that's exactly what it is - I perceive the ads as louder.

Interactive adverts
This is another joy of iPlayer. If you're watching on normal television, and the adverts start, you can sit glued to them, or you can get up, wander about, make a cup of tea... If you're watching on catch-up, they'll introduce a product that comes in a selection of flavours, and make you pick one. If you aren't interested enough even to bother picking one, it'll pick one for you. Eventually. If that happens, it can make the ad break last twice as long.

Apart from that, some of it's all right!

I really like The Blacklist but I didn't get to see the end of series 1 because I moved away to uni and I didn't have the channel any more. Before series 2 started they repeated series 1, so my Dad recorded it and I watched it then. But there was an overlap of about 3 weeks. The channel's introduction to the S1 episode I was watching revealed that a character who had died mid-season 1 was still alive in season 2. I hate spoilers and I was really annoyed. Why would you give away the plot like that?

Sorry if I spoiled The Blacklist for anyone who didn't know!

The thing I find most annoying is when the commercials come on, they are significantly louder than the programme. The considerable difference in volume is extremely irritating.

lesley153 and MotherGoose,
If you happen to need a new TV soon, check to see if it comes with Sound Volume Control, Dynamic Range Compression or some similar circuitry. These types of circuits maintain a steady level of output sound to the output speaker amplifiers. The technology has been around for decades but only recently, because of the inclusion of digital architecture and multitasking ICs in the TV control circuitry, has it been incorporated into commercially available TV sets. If your TV has an onscreen volume bar to represent how loud you've set your volume, you probably have this circuitry.
This wiki link shows some of the original equipment that led to these designs. Also, under the Marketing paragraph you'll find an explanation of how commercials become louder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

Thanks, Mehaul. As I watch everything on my computer, I haven't looked at TV specs for years. This all sounds quite miraculous!

Thanks Mehaul - I have passed on the information to Maynooth as he is in charge of all the electronic and technical stuff in our household. Next time we buy a TV, we'll take your information into consideration.

Another annoying thing is putting all this garbage on the screen advertising their upcoming programs and specials and so forth. Used to be just a 'bug' in the corner of the screen; now you will see distracting animation, flashing letters, etc. Sometimes, important things in the program are covered up, especially on GSN, when they actually cover up the game boars with all the garbage they add, so you can't see what the MC and the players are talking about.