The Advent of HD

When our eyes were opened

People are always whining about how terrible things are, and it really gets to me because things are better than they ever have been in the history of humanity. People get so many blessings, but then they take them for granted — especially if you grew up with them. So, for the young’ns, I’m going to tell you about the days before HD TV.

I bet a lot of people no longer remember what TV was like back in the day. Everything was these squarish 4:3 cathode ray tube screens, and those guys weighed a ton. Even at like 27 inches — a TV considered tiny by today’s standards but quite large back then — it was too heavy for one person to move. But the thing is, while you could get a giant 60” TV back then, that meant just a large, blurry image. Because TV back then was about the equivalent of 640x480 resolution. So imagine taking this image and blowing it up to a 60”.

Except that doesn’t even portray how blurry the images were back on a cathode ray tube, which is analog and doesn’t display distinct pixels. But that was TV. That’s all we had. The height was a hundred channels on cable that were all just indistinct and blurry, but we were happy with it because we knew of nothing else.

And then comes HD.

For someone who didn’t grow up with the way TV used to be, it is hard to describe what it was like the first time you saw an HD image. It was like you spent your life horribly near-sighted, and then suddenly, for the first time in your life you got glasses and saw what the world looked like. And the first HD was like 720p — that’s 1280x720 pixels — a resolution nowadays we wouldn’t consider worthy of a show for dogs. But this was a lightyear leap from the square, blurry analog image — a wide, sharp, distinct image on a TV for the first time ever. Images like you yourself could see in real life now on your TV screen.

A 1280x720 image

There were only four HD channels when HD first came out: a couple of networks that only had their latest shows in HD, and a PBS channel that was basically an HD screensaver, showing lots of HD landscapes with music most of the time. And you could stare at that for hours, not believing what you were seeing on a home TV set. In fact, it could have just been filming the street out front of my house, and I would have watched, so fascinated I was to go from that blurry box I spent my childhood staring at.

It’s been decades of HD now, though, and it’s just what we’re used to. Every junk program nowadays would have been this miracle thing to see back in the 90s, but no one even thinks about it now. In fact, we get annoyed if some program is just 1080 when we have our beautiful, giant 4K OLED screens. Another miraculous blessing we’re just used to and take for granted. But so is so much of life.

But the next time you watch The Price Is Right on a clear, crisp image that people from last century could never imagine, pause for a moment to realize how blessed you are.