The first interesting discovery was that the display looked much better than it "should", i.e. the characters seemed much more round than the quantization level seemed to indicate, yet, when they were blown up larger in size, they quickly became ugly. The intuitive reason for this has to do with the inherent noise reducing filter function of the optic tract that, essentially, first averages the signal (using an averaging window of about .02° of arc) which turns small corners into fuzz, then differentiates over a larger area to tweak the scene back into a sharp image. The effect of this filter is to remove small isolated glitches and, luckily for us, to allow matrix defined characters to look beautiful when the matrix is small. It also partially explains why 875 line TV seems to be subjectively more than twice as good as 525 at 22" viewing distance. The scan lines and their spaces are too large to be filtered for 525 since they are about 1/50" high. |