Comment by phantasmish
Comment by phantasmish 5 hours ago
One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.
The other’s fake noise.
One’s a real photo from 1890. The other’s an old-timey instagram filter.
It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference. Like, I love my old family Polaroids. I would not want a scanned version of those to have the “noise” removed for compression’s sake. If that had been done, I’d have limited interest in adding fake noise back to them. By far my favorite version to have would be the originals, without the “noise” smoothed out at all.
Lots of folks have similar feelings about film. Faked grain isn’t what they’re after, at all. It’s practically unrelated to what they’re looking for.
> One’s an accurate recording of how a real thing looked.
> The other’s fake noise
But since there is no such thing as the real thing, it could just as well match one of the many real noise patterns in one of the many real things floating around, or a real thing at a different point in time with more/less degradation. And you wouldn't even know the difference, thus...
> It makes sense that some folks might care about the difference
Not really, it doesn't make sense to care about identical noise you can't tell apart. Of course, plenty people care about all kind of nonsense, so that won't stop those folks, but let's not pretentd there is some 'real physics' involved