+Engadget​ misguided when reviewing the Chromecast audio

In cons:
* Audio quality may not be up to par for discerning listeners

For anyone out there who's spent a decent amount of money on audio speakers, there's a chance that the hardware inside the Chromecast Audio won't be of high-enough quality for such a purchase to make sense.

So how +Engadget​ evaluated the audio quality: Maybe guessing from the price point or something?
As usual, it would be nice for the press to abstain rating the quality of things they have no idea how to evaluate.

I look forward receiving mine, and will try to find a way to actually measure its analog audio quality, also the digital one (mostly: to see if there's re-sampling involved)

#supercurioBlog #critic #audio



Chromecast Audio review: Give your old speakers a new brain
Google’s audio-only Chromecast won’t make sense for everyone, but for a certain kind of customer, it’ll be a no-brainer.

Source post on Google+

⚠ FREAKING LASERS ⚠

So yeah, why lasers?! You may ask.
A cinema projector is supposed to display intergalactic ships, not shoot them down.

The reason motivating using lasers is driven by the UHD standard and its Rec. 2020 color gamut.
Rec. 2020 colorspace gamut red green and blue primaries are single wavelength colors.
That's how you can render the most intense saturated colors. More intense and saturated than any AMOLED or LCD with Quantum Dots.

Lasers, by nature are this single wavelength light source and thus are just what's needed to render the whole Rec. 2020 gamut when you mix three of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020#/media/File:CIExy1931_Rec_2020.svg

Because we're still talking only about making colors by adding variable amounts of 3 primaries, Rec. 2020 gamut doesn't include all colors visible by your eye. For that you would need more than 3 primaries.

It's possible to speculate than Rec. 2020 will be large enough that we might never go further than that by adding more single wavelength primaries and cover even more of the visible light.
But who knows, that might become the next marketing argument at some point 😁

TV manufacturers are also preparing laser backlight LCDs units.
We're not sure yet if they'll reach the public due to power efficiency concerns.
The wide gamut TVs you'll be able to buy, covering not the whole Rec. 2020 gamut but a good portion of them might stay AMOLED or LCDs + Quantum dots.

Between HDR high brightness and full Rec. 2020 support, be sure the future will have everything needed to massage your retinas just right.

#supercurioBlog #color #video



IMAX with laser: Superb contrast, 4K resolution, and huge color gamuts | Ars Technica
Ars checks out Europe’s first IMAX laser cinema.

Source post on Google+

Very impressive new lossless image compression codec: FLIF

It appears to beat, in compression every other existing lossless image codec in every scenario: wow!
It supports alpha channel, up to 16 bit per channel, is interlaced by default for progressive loading and decoding.

Demos: http://flif.info/example.php

Kind of compression performance to expect:
26% smaller than brute-force crushed PNG files.
35% smaller than typical PNG files.

For lossless, that's huge gains.

#supercurioBlog #image #compression #codec



FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format
FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format. FLIF is a novel lossless image format which outperforms PNG, lossless WebP, lossless BPG and lossless JPEG2000 in terms of compression ratio. According to the compression experiments we have performed, FLIF files are, on average: …

Source post on Google+

New Nexus camera sensors

+Nexus​​​​ 5X and 6P cameras are indeed based on a large sensor, and choosing this characteristic appear to be indeed legitimately at the expense of OIS.
The IMX377 is a 1/2.3 type: 7.81mm diagonal

In comparison, the Galaxy S6/Edge/Edge+/Note 5, LG G4, is 1/2.6: 6.828 mm (in 16:9)

It's the same sensor diagonal size albeit in 4:3 than the 16:9 1/2.3 type in the Z1 to Z5, which don't have OIS either.

More sensor sizes in phones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exmor

Note: 1/2.3 for 4:3 format is more surface area than 1/2.3 for 16:9 as this metric characterize the diagonal and not the surface area that captures light which evolves at the height x width (aka square)

#supercurioBlog #camera #Nexus



Sony Global – Products IMX377
Sony Image Sensor for Camera

Source post on Google+