Ultra High Definition Video

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday September 28, 2003 @04:43AM from the now-thats-a-lot-of-pixels dept.

mr.henry writes "Engineers at the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) have developed a prototype ultra high definition video (UHDV) system. How good is it? When it was shown to the public, some viewers experienced nausea because of the ultra realistic visual effect of speed without the usual physical sensation of movement. 18 minutes of UHDV takes up 3.5 terabytes." 4,000 horizontal scanlines. Excellent.

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Just one step closer by xTBDx · 2003-09-28 04:47 · Score: 5, Funny

Just one step closer to the Matrix. On a side note, it's also a novel way of giving people nausea and filling state-of-the-art hard drives in minutes flat - without installing Windows!
Damn it! by Transcendent · 2003-09-28 05:00 · Score: 5, Funny

And I just bought a $10,000 HD Plasma TV!!! Now it's obsolete!!! ::crys:: I can never win with technology!
Because perhaps 24fps is better for film by Small+Hairy+Troll · 2003-09-28 05:44 · Score: 5, Informative

Here is a quote from the October 2003 issue of Digital Video. "24p: Back to the Future?"

"When Douglas Trumbull developed Showscan (70mm at 60 fps) in 1976, he noted a profound psychological reaction among his test audiences when the frame rate hit 60 fps: The film ceased to be a film and was more like a window into reality: It just wasn't any good for storytelling, Trumbull claimed. Showscan was thus relegated to theme park immersive venues, and a grand experiment in theatrical storytelling frame rates was shunted aside.
Re:At what point do they have to be careful? by bdeclerc · 2003-09-28 06:48 · Score: 5, Informative

In answer to your questions:

There is no exact "frame-rate" of the human eye, because different parts of the eye respond differently to change, some parts have higher refresh than others. This is why screen-flicker is easier to detect by looking at a screen sideways (the edge of vision has higher refresh rates, probably an evolutionary left-over, being able to detect movement quickly near the edge of vision is the closest we can come to having eyes on the back of our head).

As for resolution, this is highest near the center of your eye's field of view, and is mainly dependant on how close together the light-sensitive cells are in the middle of the eye. In practical terms, max resolution of most people's eyes is a couple of arc-minutes (1 arc-minute = 1/60 of a degree). To put this in real terms, 1 arc-minute is the angular size of an object when viewed from a distance 3437x its size, so a 1.8m (6ft) human being seen at 6.2km (3.9 miles) is about an arc minute high.

For a Computer monitor, that means that people with good vision (say 2 arc minute resolution) sitting 1 foot (30cm) away from a monitor, should be able to distinguish a pixel 0.09mm (0.0034") across, but only just. Typical LCD-screens have pixels 0.25-0.30 mm across.