Connect The Dots... La, La, La, La...

Still irked at having to watch sub-par "film" over the weekend. Sunday I found more- the modern version of the slide show, a laptop with a video projector. I attended an outdoor expo at a local outfitters, several of the presenters had laptops showing medium or lo-res slide shows. Cripes. You'd think that someone trying to sell you something would have a little better effort than that. Actually, the seminar I got the most out of was done au naturel, so to speak- just a guy talking with a couple of maps and some informative brochures. Classy, and I could bring them home with me.

If the visual materials in a presentation fall below a certain level of image quality, there is no point in having them- one blurry picture of a river or a tree looks about the same as another. I don't think we should go back to the old time slide shows (they had their share of problems as well) but perhaps a little more thought could be used in the selection of presentation materials.

And concerning lo-res digital transfers of movies: if you take all the "wow" factor out of your images, don't expect people to keep paying for the "privilege" of viewing them.

We are still in the middle of the digital transition. Most newer digital cameras can make reasonable high rez images (20 megabyte or larger files- 7 megapixel or larger cameras), a properly exposed slide projected from film is about that. The stuff I was looking at was about a quarter of the resolution of those, some even less. Lots of dots, dithered together in a digital mush. Yuck.