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Sony Develops TVs That Zoom in for True Close-ups
prakslash writes "Sony has unveiled version 2 of its 'Digital Reality Creation' technology that allows viewers to pan around a TV image and then zoom in. Unlike the current TVs that simply scale the image, Sony's technology does 'true' zooming by digitally enhancing the signal to communicate gloss, depth and texture.
True zoom is a bit of a stretch.. The only way you could have a true zoom is if you have a higher resolution digital image to look at, or an analog image... This produce creates sophisticated, but generated results. There is nothing true about it.
Regardless, this is one of those features that "sounds nice", but I think its the company telling the consumer what to want rather than vice versa. Never once have I wanted to zoom in on a modern or high def television image.
Come on. "true zoom" requires data that simply isn't there in a TV signal.
Sure, an HD signal can be zoomed and interpolated to some extent, but call it "creation" or not, there is only so much info that can be "guessed".
Yet all DVRs on the market currently use MPEG compression to put more data on the HD at the expense of video quality... so, they're not even storing all the video in that came from the original TV station feed to begin with. I'm not quite sure what Sony's magic tech will do when asked to zoom in on an MPEG artifact...
my 4 year old dvd player has 16x zoom. big deal. used it once.
I can only think of one genre of movies that this would be used for...
Unlike the current TVs that simply scale the image, Sony's technology does 'true' zooming by digitally enhancing the signal to communicate gloss, depth and texture.
READ: Zooms image and antialiases the hell out of it. Same effect as crossing your eyes and sticking your nose to the screen, but now available from the remote control!
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...Sci-fi's that use arbitrary plot fixes on photos that lack the resolution they need by using a computer to "zoom in and enhance" the image. Sometimes it's so ridiculous that I wanna belch. The only way this could truely be accurate is if the TV signal carries more data (for example, zooming on a 1080i HD signal). But HD has yet to approach critical mass...ugh.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
At 990x you're looking at less than one pixel, but a salesman last month was toating it as "the best zoom you can get."
I refuse to accept "digital zoom" as being any better than just putting a magnifying glass next to the same old low res image.
Well, it is better because in the digital domain it is possible to do a lot of operations more complex than just a magnification. A lot of these operations get lumped in to the "digital zoom" name.
Come on, it's trying to create data that just plain isn't coming from the original source, therefore
This is somewhat true but not completely. What you're forgetting is that the human visual apparatus is part of the complete system and can't be left out. Our vision system is good at detecting certain features at certain resolutions, and not so good at others. Some image processing algorithms might just "make up stuff". This too, is not necessarily bad if it can give a pleasing effect to the eye. Especially if there is a high degree of likelihood that what it is making up is an accurate representation of what actually existed before it was lost by the original signal recording.
Manytimes however, the enhancement consists of emphasizing certain things in the time or frequency domain that really do exist in the original signal but our vision does not detect because of the relationship to other nearby features. Image enhancement is not necessarily making things up. It is just using known facts about the human visual system to selectively bring out certain features that might be missed with our brain's stock detection circuitry.
What is funny about a lot of "anti digital effects" people is that they think they are automatically getting better results by having say a 48-bit scanner vs a 30-bit one because there is more information, nevermind that the lower bits are completely overwhelmed by noise and shitty A-D conversion path.
In your defense, the posting sounds very stupid and marketing influenced (redundant, I know) Calling something like this true zoom, even with the single quotes is very disingenous.
I don't know, it's probably just me, but I don't think adding a "feature" like this to a tv set should be a cause for worldwide hype in a normal world.
:P are (I hope) probably not targeted to people who understand the techniques laying behind.
:D
I mean zooming an image is no rocket science (and in this case is probably no good either). Recognizing public demand for such a function in the case of tv's and adding it could be good for businness. But hyping such a function this much... it's just a nobrainer.
But then again, the hype around these new functions and revolutionary enhancements
One thing to add from the image procssing guy's side: for normal pal-resolution tv sets a certain amount of everyday zooming wouldn't show that much zooming error as e.g. a plasma screen would. Just try grabbing a lowres low-bitrate video (lets say quarter pal res + ~500kbit mpeg4) and play it full screen on a 50cm tv set (many artifacts are smoothed out) and some 100cm digital (where they all remain visible).
But I still don't like the hype around it. It's like when MS said DB-based file system is coming in '06 and that will be so great and cool and all. When we first heard them we just looked at each other and wondered: with all their research facilities behind their backs, how come in some cases they all lurk so behind ? Another example would be using neural networks for learning and adapting applications. Anybody moving around in scientific research can come around many dozens of applications and research fields using them every year. Still, most of everyday people don't have a clue what that is and they all get easily caught into the hype tides.
Well, scientific research and company policies are not so close to each other as one would guess
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
you gotta love any article where the word True is in quotes.
vk.
All electronic cameras have fixed noise patterns. They vary from camera to camera usually, but with several frames and now commonly available software, you can detect the pattern, clean it up, and interpolate the data from where it was with a good deal of precision.
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I don't see any (ahem) reason to use this feature. The killer app for resolution-upsampling, or whatever, is front-projection TVs! Instead of optically zooming up your image to full wall-size, complete with pixels larger than lego bricks, use this technology to zoom the signal up to the native resolution of a hi-res LCD projector. (or highest res available if its a CRT)
"I forgot my mantra."
This may be useful for helping (pardon the pun) smooth the transition to HDTV. Right now most of our cable channels are not HD, and the difference between the HD and regular digital TV channels is quite stark. On a large screen, regular digtal TV becomes almost unbearable once you get used to HD. But more importantly, perhaps many people are uninterested in buying an HDTV because they know how little content is available and realize that most TV is going to look just as crappy anyway. This could be a good marketing point for Sony- a processor that helps non-HD TV look better on your big-screen TV.
Why is this news? This is marketing garbage. It's still digital zoom. Worthless for television.
could it be some sort of fractal expansion? Probably too cpu intensive. eg... http://www.lizardtech.com/solutions/gf/
Not a sentence!
As anyone dabbling in image processing knows. Given any image information, you cannot add entropy to an image with certainty that it is correct.
However they label thier zooming, if they are introducing information into the image then you have a false image.
However, like the DivX 'warmth' plugin, randomised information can give us perceptual detail that is interpretted by our visual system to 'look right'
Otherwise all are doing is zooming with subpixel antialiasing.
In this day and age I think the signal is digital, so how is any modification of the original signal enhancing?
Now enhancing is a very broad word, but to me this article is a marketting trip to consumer land, nothing new here, move along.
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