In my last post I mentioned that Bill Kurtis, in his “I’m Bill Kurtis, and I’m faster than …” commercial series, didn’t appear to be consistent with the laptops the techies were supplying him with.
Obviously, I have seen the original commercial several times since and have been paying attention.
Well apparently he has been consistent, I again demonstrated my general incompetence by, in this case, wanting to see brown (ughh!) in the form of the Gnome desktop. In fact, it was much closer to the greenish blue of the second “Andy Roddick” commercial. And, there is the disclaimer at the bottom of the screen: “Simulated images”
This bugs me a lot. I’ve said it before, I say it again: it seems that for something as simple as these commercials, the screenshot doesn’t matter; all they are trying to do is avoid having some software developer demand royalties for the screenshot, so they make a generic desktop screenshot in-house. Too bad, the techies in the back usually would love to see their laptop in a (inter)nationally broadcast commercial and have the bragging rights.
Of course, putting aside my conspiracy theory about the TV producers not wanting to pay royalties for the on-screen use of copyrighted software or the legal department not wanting to risk depicting a “real, live OS” (like it or not that’s what MS is) and making potential customers think that what is being advertised will *actually*work* with their computer (hey, there’s a new conspiracy theory for me!), there is probably a much more logical explanation, along the lines of the difference in cycles between a screen and a TV camera (flickering), or simply maybe it’s difficult to get a good screen resolution off a computer in the shot on TV.