Quote:
Originally Posted by zenith2134
What I'm trying to figure out is how much of a perceptible improvement would it have made...
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The advantage of wideband I is often stated as increasing the color in small details, but the lack of color in isolated small objects is not that obvious unless you have the original for comparison. Where it does help considerably is reducing smearing and making the texture clearer in all-red objects like a rose, red rocks, or the side of a barn. It also decreases the smeariness of color in video games, though of course not equally for all colors. It also decreases the smearing of things like lips with red lipstick, but again, that may not be so immediately obvious without comparison to the original. The color saturation on the edges of faces is also preserved since the +I axis is essentially flesh tone.
It also has some unwanted effects on colored lettering, for example the typical yellow titles in old western movies would be the correct yellow on the horizontal strokes, but redder on the thin vertical strokes due to the lack of Q signal resolution.
At Zenith, the final decision was that it was a definite and advertisable improvement overall if the encoder was acceptable; but if not, the rainbows on edges due to quadrature distortion were unacceptable. Those could only be fixed by doing the same thing RCA apparently did - reducing the I high frequency response, to the point that the improvement was mostly lost.