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Thousands in UK Still Watch TV in Black and White

posted by martyb on Thursday November 08 2018, @09:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-don't-see-what-you-did-there dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

More than 7,000 people still watch TV in black and white more than half a century after colour broadcasts began.

London has the most TV licences for black and white sets at 1,768, followed by 431 in the West Midlands and 390 in Greater Manchester.

A total of 7,161 UK households have failed to start watching in colour despite transmissions starting in 1967.

BBC2 was the first channel to regularly broadcast in colour from July that year with the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

The number of black and white licences has almost halved in the past five years and is down from 212,000 in 2000.

Aha! Those must be the last Manichaeans.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 09 2018, @05:51AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday November 09 2018, @05:51AM (#759733) Journal

    https://us.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-aura-one [kobobooks.com]

    Mine is 8GB. Didn't have the 32GB option in Oz. Still way more storage than I need. Epubs seem to average about a meg. It could hold 8000 of them.

    If there was a 32 GB option for Kobo, I didn't see it on their website. So I brought up Amazon which is selling 8 GB and 32 GB.

    The one option it doesn't have that I would have liked to see was to read in landscape.

    The Kobo Forma [kobobooks.com] is shown with a landscape mode. I assumed they would all have this. Guess not.

    I don't like reading PDFs because they all seem to be formatted for A4 or US Letter size and it doesn't matter how high the resolution is, I can't easily read it without a lot of scrolling. PDFs are for printing not screens anyway. Rarely read comics, and if I did it would be on the 24" colour monitor.

    If the screen is large enough, it could be sufficient for PDFs and comics. Your Kobo Aura One is 7.8", and the largest they offer is the Kobo Forma at 8.0" (not much difference there).

    Using a flexible display could help with this. It doesn't even need to be fully flexible. Make it so that half the device is rigid, and half the screen can fold over. Then you could have a larger display and possibly a better aspect ratio, but make it easy to carry around.

    We have those, they are called video screens and are different to books. Also, the main application they can think of is to show you ads. Fuck em.

    I'm pretty sure you browse the web and maybe watch a video from time to time. Call it what it is, a tablet. E-readers are just as capable of showing you ads, as Amazon has proven. Otherwise, if ads are not baked into the system, when you use a PC, phone, tablet, or whatever, it's up to you to use software on your devices that don't show you ads.

    I'd like a general purpose tablet device that can be used for everything. Clearly, e-ink has some big advantages over an LCD/OLED tablet. It's readable in sunlight, it's less straining on the eyes in a dark room, and it has better battery life. However, hypothetically, if there was an e-ink device that also displayed color, could refresh portions of the screen at up to 30 Hz (or maybe even 60 Hz) whenever needed (but still at "0 Hz" when reading a book), may or may not be flexible (choose the one you want), and didn't compromise PPI/quality due to any of these new features (basically, it doesn't look like shit, with no compromises made), then it could be considered the ultimate tablet device. Assume that the battery life would be about the same if you were only reading books in page turning mode, but would drop if you started using it for things like smooth scrolling or videos. The improved CPU/GPU performance needed should not hurt battery life since we've had devices with both high performance and low power cores for years. ARM's big.LITTLE successor DynamIQ could allow you to have a SoC with 6 high performance cores, 1 low power core, and 1 really low power core for e-reader mode.

    From what I can tell, such a device (e-ink with color and/or video) is possible and there has been progress made towards it. But it is stuck in the R&D phase and may stay there for years. If they don't think they can market it, it may never leave the lab.

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  • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday November 09 2018, @07:09AM

    by deimtee (3272) on Friday November 09 2018, @07:09AM (#759755) Journal

    The Forma came out after I bought the Aura. Have not really checked it out, as I am not upgrading at the moment.
    The ideal device you describe does sound awesome, but I actually like the single purposedness of the Kobo. I wanted something to read books on, and that was all. I have a 17" asus laptop for big stuff, and a homebuilt desktop for really big stuff.

    Have you looked at the screen that was on the original OLPC? Black/white reflective + colour emissive, both running at once. Quite innovative for its time, you'd think 10 years later they should have improved it.

    In a way, I can see it being like the appeal of Apple stuff. The Kobo just works. Hopefully they'll release a software update with landscape mode, it would make PDFs and comics better, if still not great.

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