One Thousand, Eighty

The theater can be a wonderful thing: bright and thundering sound, the shared experience, and the large screen, with perfectly clear images flashing before our eyes. The attempt to bring that experience to the home with the home theater is rapidly evolving. We've moved from the "tube" (cathode ray tube) televisions, to the flat screen tv with "full 1080" resolution. That means that there are 1080 pixels, or RGB (red, green and blue) dots lining the side of the tv vertically, and 1920 pixels stretching across the bottom. That's a lot of pixels! 2,073,600 to be exact. While there's a bit more than that on the theater screen (up to 4K (4096×2160 (8,847,360 pixels) which is 4.26 times as many pixels) in some digital cinemas (the same resolution at which the RED camera captures raw footage)), you've got to admit that the 1080 resolution is pretty impressive.
I recently purchased myself a Samsung Blu-Ray player, capable of this 1080 output, to go along with my apartment's 720p Panasonic Viera, 50 inch plasma television. Using Netflix, I've been able to rent several blu-ray discs and watch some very decent movies on beautiful 1080p. The result is amazing. There truly is a visible difference between DVD resolution and Blu-ray resolution, something that I feel brings out the filmic qualities of the movies. These movies that were shot on film deserve to be presented in something less digitized (or compressed) than a DVD, especially when viewed on a 50" television.
Whether it's the fact that the television is plasma, or simply that it's a high resolution image being displayed through a slightly lower resolution television (1080 movie played on a 720 tv), or just the fact that it's a high-definition image, I feel that the smoothness, or the filmic quality of the movie is preserved when I watch films like the one I watched last night: Patriot Games (starring Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan (the role previously played by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt For Red October) released in 1992, directed by Phillip Noyce). Truly HD film transfers are one step closer to that wondrous experience of going to the theaters and viewing beautiful films (even when their digitized)