The saddest picture.......

[Poll_Blind]

58. Grainy. Color bleed. Soft edges.

Much tougher to tell back in the early days of digital cameras. A picture taken with a Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997) would have some of the same problems. There's two main video formats, NTSC and PAL. NTSC is used mainly in the US and some other places. Anyway, both of those formats are pretty terrible (generally) for preserving an image and so artifacts are introduced.

It also appeared that the image had been blown up in some way (it turned out that it was cropped) and so that made it look odd. For instance, if you do that grim Google Image search for Iraqi Orphans you're going to see a good example of what modern (last 7-10 years) digital camera stills will look like- which is much sharper.

The color bleed and soft edges is a big one too. There's not a lot of contrast and so things appear darker, generally. There's a yellow overcast to the whole thing but I've seen red overcasts and sometimes blue. Just not a lot of dynamic range in the image.

PB