Quote of the day:

It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief, enemies with the worst intentions, or friends with the best.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I have long believed that 4K, like a lot of other stuff coming out of the tech world in the last few years, is mostly hokum.

In case you aren’t familiar with the term, 4K refers to a higher resolution of digital video, so there are 4K TV sets and 4K blu-rays, and so on. Now I maintain that most people can’t really tell the difference between the standard high definition video picture and a 4K picture. It’s really merely a marketing gimmick to sucker the rubes to pay more. But perhaps I’m wrong.

Be that as it may, many things have been coming out in 4K.

I also believe that most folks who run corporations are idiots. Take HBO, for example. They can’t even settle on a name. Are they HBO or Max or HBO Max or whatever is their latest name? Whoever is in charge is clearly a doofus.

Now HBO, or HBO Max or whatever it is they’re calling themselves these days, has acquired the rights to the TV series Mad Men. But that’s not all. They’ve upped the ante by upping the resolution to 4K to give “audiences and longtime Mad Men fans the opportunity to enjoy the series’ authentically crafted elements with crisp detail and enhanced visual clarity.”

Oh, goody, goody.

And what details can we see now that we couldn’t see previously?

Well, in Season One there is a scene where Roger Sterling is vomiting. In the original, all you can see is Roger and the group of six mad men standing around him.

But in the enhanced 4K version, just look at the additional detail:

Let me draw your attention to the crew members over on the far right hand side of the screen who are feeding the hose to create the illusion of puking.

Now that’s detail!

Clearly, I was wrong. You can see more detail in a 4K picture that you can’t see in standard high definition.

Todd Vaziri has a lot more to say about this and has lot of examples. Apparently Mad HBO Max screwed up the order and titles of the episodes and their episodes don’t have the digital visual effects. It’s quite a mess. What was it I said about corporations being run by idiots?