I don’t own a TV, so I really haven’t looked at a television in years. But tonight I had an odd experience. I go to a particular restaurant fairly often. They have 2 TVs: one has sports on and the other usually cycles through cartoons. Most of the time I can’t look at either of them. The sports TV has the usual unnatural motion response thing going on and the white text on ESPN looks like it’s glowing. The one with cartoons seems like it’s running at the wrong resolution or there’s some sort of mismatch, so I usually ignore it.
Tonight for whatever reason I happened to be near the cartoon TV and they had the Flintstones on, you know, the one from the ‘60s. I usually ignore that TV but I was at a different table and I used to watch this show as a kid in the ‘90s so I kept looking up at it. Usually I can’t look at these TVs for more than a few seconds. But tonight I started to notice I could actually watch this one. To the point where I didn’t actually believe it. So I thought to myself, okay, let’s see if they go to commercial and see what happens. Maybe they fixed the TV. As soon as the commercials came on the colors got blown out, overly bright, and blurry. Couldn’t look at it at all. I kept trying through the different commercials and while sometimes the colors and image would stabilize, it kept looking oversaturated. I waited a few minutes, the Flintstones came back on, and I could look at it again.
What the heck happened?
As I was walking out, I got fairly close to the TV and could see how blurry the picture was up close and it got uncomfortable. I had been sitting probably 20 feet away from the TV earlier when it was fine.
I have my theories, but I’m interested in hearing what you guys think.