6.12.2011

Strange indeed




Growing up as I did (a long, long time ago) in the telephone industry I saw first-hand the extraordinary efforts devoted to making the audio fidelity of a phone call as high as possible, in one memorable instance involving a debate about whether or not adding one more hole to the cover over the transmitter on a telephone handset would improve or degrade sound quality. But it turned out people were perfectly happy to use cell phones having audio quality that would have been considered disgraceful in the 1960s or 1970s.

Same for music: People walk around listening to MP3s on earbuds instead of vinyl fidelity pumped through thousand-dollar amplifiers into five-foot speakers like we did (or aspired to do) back in the day.

And now photos: There is an app on Apple's store that will make your cool digital HD video look like it was shot on ancient Super-8, and any number of apps that will make digital stills look like they were shot with toy cameras of the 1940s, and even, like the picture above, on expired film.

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