One of my pet peeves is hearing people, especially those in the broadcast media, use a particular word to emphasize their point, but use the incorrect definition of the word. Two such words are prototype and literal.
How many times have you heard a sports broadcaster describe a player as “the prototype of an NFL […]
The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament is one of the most exciting sporting events in the US. Unlike the NBA playoffs, what makes the college tourney so fascinating is that every game is an elimination match. On the first 4-day weekend games are played throughout the day as the field gets whittled down from […]
By February, 2009, all television stations in the US are required by federal law to convert their over-the-air analog broadcasts to digital television (DTV) broadcasts. However, there is a lot of misinformation going around with regard to what that transition means to the consumer.
First of all, the transition will only impact free over-the-air broadcasts via […]
Blu-ray Disc (abbreviated either BD or BRD) is the brand name for a new type, or format, of optical media disc. Blu-ray discs are the same physical size as standard CDs and DVDs and look very similar. Its name comes from the fact that it uses a blue laser (actually the violet spectrum) to read […]
High-definition television (often shortened to high-def or abbreviated HDTV) refers to the increased level of detail and clarity which is possible on the latest generation of television displays.
Of course, terms like high definition are always relative to the previous technology, just as high fidelity audio in the 1950s was better than its predecessor, but not […]
The difference between an analog broadcast and a digital broadcast is difficult to explain without some prior knowledge of how radio and television signals get from the tower to your home in the first place. Suffice it to say that broadcast signals are a type of electromagnetic wave that carries data through space. How far […]
Size, compression, and resolution are three characteristics which determine the quality of a digital photograph. The size of a digital photo is usually expressed in terms of pixel dimensions, such as 1024 x 768. The quality of digital cameras is usually expressed in megapixels, which represents one million photo sensors in the camera.
While megapixels and […]
Most of today’s consumer electronic products now record everything in digital format. Digital cameras have replaced almost all film snapshot cameras. Video cameras now record on a hard drive or directly to memory cards or mini-DVDs. Telephone answering machines have been digital (replacing the analog cassette tapes) for quite awhile now. Digital video recorders (DVR) […]
Digital media refers to any type of media — words, pictures, audio, or video — which is stored on a computer, digital device, or optical media. As discussed in the article, Digital Bits and Bytes, everything on a computer is stored as a series of numeric bits. In other words, to the computer, there is […]