Why do TV screens and monitors look better than what I see in person? It’s as if they’re “clearer” than my vision.
In: Technology
Just a theory that may in no way be correct but I got a pair of sunglasses with a polarising filter in and images became a lot sharper and exactly how you mention in terms of a nice TV image. The while summer I kept looking at treelines and for some reason pavements and electrical ground covers on the floor (like manhole covers but just to expose like a CatV cable or something) had this real definition.
So basically I’m wondering whether it’s the cameras and TV screen filtering very well loads of crap that otherwise our eyes would have to work quite hard to try and filter.
You might need glasses for distance vision?
People are like flies to a light. The general public seems to like the colours of their monitors to be overly saturated and overly bright, instead of accurate. Perhaps that makes it more pleasing.
There are probably more than a few factors at play, to a greater or lesser degree, and all mixed together:
1 – When you’re looking at a screen the screen is the focal plane. Even if the screen might be displaying something that is in close focus with a blurred background (like a closeup shot of an actors face or such) in the physical world outside of the film you’re watching, you’re only focusing on the surface of the television a few feet away.
2 – The image is backlit. Real life has messy and uneven lighting. I’m in my office right now, after dark, with various lights on… and the “crispness” of the room is a mess in that regard. Some areas are bright, some are dim, and other than the computer monitor I’m looking at right now none of them are projecting light *out* at me. It gives the monitor and the images on it a sort of hyper-reality compared to the duller surfaces in the room.
3 – The images you see on a television are, especially in the case of modern content, fairly stylized. The film/TV industry employs armies of people whose entire career is centered around tweaking and tinkering with the image you see on the screen to create the desired effect the director wants. Color grading, sharpening, etc. It’s the same thing that happens when you see a really good landscape photo of somewhere you’ve been and the photo looks *so good* compared to what you saw. The photo is capturing a moment in time and that moment has been manipulated and tweaked to create a desired outcome. In that regard, even a simple sequence of a guy walking down the street in an action movie (before the action even starts) looks so much more “real” than seeing somebody walking by your apartment on the street because the whole experience has been carefully tweaked and calibrated to make you feel that way.
4 – Related to photography and lenses… the gear used in professional film making is phenomenal and can “see” things in a different way than you do in your day to day life because of focal length, lens “sharpness”, etc. In a scene in a movie where the camera pans over a desktop, showing some crumbled paper, a broken pencil, and a tipped over glass, for instance, the angle and the clarity of the shot may be quite different (in terms of height compared to the way you’d look at in person and lens angle/depth of field, compared to your eye) than how you would actually see the scene in real life. Again, it’s how that photo of a place you’ve been in person can look so different.
So really I think it comes down to a combination of the tool and techniques used on the production side combined with the quality and brightness of modern TV and monitor displays.
TV screens are lit. You may be losing low light vision. Many things can cause this like glaucoma, cataracts, shedding from UV damage.
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