14 September 2006
Taking the "bullshot" to another level
As coined last september by Penny Arcade, a "bullshot" is a screenshot, that, while it may use actual assets from the product, is hand-polished by whatever thankless production intern is currently the marcom deparment's bitch.
Microsoft launched their shiny [and ugly but that's another post] Zune player today. It's about what everyone expected and looks like the FCC pictures that came out a while back.
On to my specific point. The Zune has a 320 x 240 screen. That's this big:
Microsoft has press shots on their website that show the screen like this:
Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken but it seems to me that this here is a wee bit deceptive. If Microsoft's scaling algorithms were as good as Adobe's [they're not] it would look somewhat like this:
Of course I'm complaining about this in the middle of the biggest journalism meltdown in history where press releases count as stories, press conferences count as TV programming and most actual "news" comes from only a dwindling handful of sources.
And before you ask, yes, the Cupertino Fruit Company is guilty of this is well.
Microsoft launched their shiny [and ugly but that's another post] Zune player today. It's about what everyone expected and looks like the FCC pictures that came out a while back.
On to my specific point. The Zune has a 320 x 240 screen. That's this big:
Microsoft has press shots on their website that show the screen like this:
Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken but it seems to me that this here is a wee bit deceptive. If Microsoft's scaling algorithms were as good as Adobe's [they're not] it would look somewhat like this:
Of course I'm complaining about this in the middle of the biggest journalism meltdown in history where press releases count as stories, press conferences count as TV programming and most actual "news" comes from only a dwindling handful of sources.
And before you ask, yes, the Cupertino Fruit Company is guilty of this is well.
