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NHK Working To Make HDTV Obsolete
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at EEtimes.com Japanese company NHK has successfully demonstrated a live relay of 'Super Hi-Vision' television, which is 16x 1080i resolution -- 7680 x 4320!" From the article: "NHK developed a Super Hi-Vision camera equipped with 8 megapixel CCD image sensors that can take 4k x 8k images. In the field test, it sent the two cameras to a sea park and sent baseband signals without image compression using an fiberoptic network formed by multiple network companies. The signal of the total 24 gigabits per second was divided into 161.5 Gbps HD-SDI signals to sent using the DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplex) method."
I just upgraded to HDTV!
As with many new technologies, the p0rn industry will probably be the first to deploy this 33,177,600 pixel technology. Boy, I feel a bit inadaquate as my halloween webcam (goes offline Saturday night) only has 337,920 pixels (704x480) - I guess size matters, eh? ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Thats all well and good but what kind of display can handle that resolution?
still can't get the EPL matches I want though, dammit
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
1080i is so 1999, or so 1959 considering its interlaced.
Yeah. Obsolete, huh. Whatever. Nice hyperbole.
HDTV will be hitting in three or four years. It will be the standard for the next fifty years, just as we've stuck with the outdated "standard" we have now for however many decades. Don't expect to see any of this (in America, at least) in our lifetimes.
So how do you suspect we will get this data, at 24gbps, from source to destination? I have a feeling that it won't be going over the airwaves....nor the current cable-tv system.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
So is this the next bext thing to retire my beta camcorder? Every time I'm about to make a choice, something better comes out ;)
KeepTrackOfIt.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your area graphically
What color ray is that disc going to need? I'm guessing puce.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Butt zits in porn at this resolution?
Iew.
Let's see data transfer and storage catch up with this development to consider it an alternative to HDTV instead of it's eventual replacement....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
On a more serious note, this isn't making HDTV obsolete by any means - HDTV is just getting started, and can barely squeeze into broadcasters budgets. Since when will we ever live to see terabit fiberoptic connections to our homes, to carry multiple channels of this?
Yeah, but only the Japanese have the 100Mbit pipes to download large videos like that, the people in america have 1-4 Mbit pipes :(
Student Research and Development
Resolution doesn't make sense unless you can see it. HDTV adoption is slow at best, and consumers aren't going to move to a better format than that for many many decades. This format might be interesting for cinemas and such, but it's not significant to HDTV at all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is HDTV! It's got better resolution than real life.
In typical slashdot byline fashion: Is this the end of HDTV? Tune in and see!
The two places it would be great are:
-Digital cinema. It might keep the movie theaters open a few more years. On the production side: Talk about a storage problem when you have to store all of the raw footage!
-"jumbotron" type displays for arena-style live events.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Anyone have a link for the live feed?
Bet this
I skimmed the article--it's a bit light on the details, but I didn't read anywhere in the article that their Super Hi-Vision was interlaced. I would hope that the next generation of TV's (or whatever form they take) would get rid of this idiotic interlacing nonsense.
You're only as smart as your brain.
'Super High Vision' sounds SuperUltraMegaCool!
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
24 (gigabits / sec) = 10.546875 terabytes / hour
Thats 21TB for a standard-length movie! ~21,000GB! Foly Huck!
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Alek, we will have to drive by and see if your web cam is for real this time. Hopefully, you are no longer bushwacking us. But I think that we will have to verify that.
Why did they not make a resolution-independent standard for HDTV?
NHK developed a Super Hi-Vision camera equipped with 8 megapixel CCD image sensors that can take 4k x 8k images
Um, 4k x 8k = 32 m
Where did the 8 megapixel come from?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
HDTV is old news and an antiquated format. It was a government standard based on OTA standards.
Tomorrow's receivers will be much faster (a la XPMCE or MythTV). OTA is dead, we want IPTV. 7.2 surround is ready. 2.35:1 is required, at a resolution of 3392 x 1440, progressive.
We want fixed 6500K color standard, with no flesh-push or blue-push. We want an adaptable decoding processor, not something stuck in one mode.
HDTV isnt the future. A PC, Gnutella, and a HD2 projector is.
Assuming the eye's lense is about 1-cm, the angular resolution of the human eye would give you about 54,212 x 54,212 pixels. assuming a 180x180 degree feild of view (with blue light). So we've still got a ways to go!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
hmm...will lucas make episodes 7-9 just to use these cameras? =P
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
I've got a hddirectivo, but the compression is fairly obvious when compared to OTA broadcasts, and even those are easy to pick out artifacts.
I don't see any huge leaps in bandwidth from any provider Real Soon Now, and wouldn't any compression to fit the available bandwidth reduce the effective resolution?
However if this is for closed-circuit feed from Hugh Hefner's humble abode, I may be interested :)
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
The signal of the total 24 gigabits per second was divided into 161.5 Gbps HD-SDI signals to sent using the DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplex) method.
This must be very innovative technology. I wonder how they can divide one 24 Gbps signal into several 161.5 Gbps signals?
Even to divide into a single 161.5, they need to divide the 24 signal by 0.148606811145511.
This DWDM stuff sounds weird...
(actual message text inserted to avoid lameness filter)
I want HDTV to die a quick death. Maybe that will stop the government from its draconian attempts to outlaw standard TV broadcasting. The shift from standard NTSC TV to something better should be accomplished through market forces. Why not? You didn't have the government outlawing 8-tracks to force everyone to cassettes. Let it happen.... or not happen... on its own.
...in other news, Bob's Cameras has created a camera that will capture at 2048 megapixels, at 3D. The data is transmitted via multiple OC192s...
Really, how much difference does this make? Joe 6 pack can't afford HDTV now. This new stuff wont be market ready for another 5 years, and it'll take another 5 after that to make people want to seperate from their HDTV's.
An OC3 transmits at 155.52 Mbps, so you MIGHT be able to cram it down an OC3 with compression, (read: errors, lossiness) if the viewer wants to pony up the $6400 just for bandwidth. I'm still paying 50% more a month for my DSL than I ever did for dialup...
Secondly, a blu-ray can store 25GB per layer, this camera writes at 24gb/s, so I get one really nice photograph per layer on my blu-ray?
Now these recent words from Ken Kutaragi of Sony Computer Entertainment, the PlayStation guru, start to make sense...
e nt&task=view&id=1470&Itemid=46
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_cont
>Generations to come
>Sony gave also a vision of things to come in terms of video
>quality and the format to support it. Today's TV sets are
>allowing resolution of 720 to 1080i. Sony calls it the 'HD ready
>generation' with a frame rate of 60 to 90 fps. This is
>symbolized by the DVD format.
>On the PC side, the WXGA is the standard with an average
>resolution of 1280x768. The coming generation called 'Full HD'
>will shift to 1080p (1920x1080) resolution for the TV and WUXGA
>(1920x1200) for the PC. TV sets will allow frame rates of 90 to
>120 fps and the Blu-ray will be the format to support this. Then
>Sony has stated its plan for the generation after called 'Super
>HD' which will start in 2008. TV sets and PC will reach a
>resolution of 2160p (4Kx2K), 240 fps of frame. The format is yet
>to be designed.
read that a while ago on a bunch of news sites. REAL news sites, not the joke that is slashdot. and I expect this post to return in a week with slightly different wording.
The only real use I can think of for this technology, considering the bandwidth requirements, would be public closed-circuit viewing of live remote events. For example, imagine this set up at the Olympic games and transmitted to 5 or 6 special "viewing arenas" (glorified theaters) worldwide so that if you can't make it to the games physically, you can go to your nearest viewing arena and pay to watch it live. Or imagine it for NFL: a team establishes a dedicated link to their home stadium whenever they play away, and ticketholders who can't travel to the away game can watch the game DLP projected (by an whole array of projectors) onto a big white canvas stretched across the astroturf.
1080i transport streams run about 5 gigs for 40 minutes and require a ~2Ghz processor to decode without dropping any frames or choppiness. I know 2Ghz isn't considered too fast - even now, but I am finding the trend to require an insanely fast machine to watch / record tv sightly odd. Without someone out there to create a unit out there that makes it easy to view HD content - and by easy, I mean "dear old mom and dad" easy, I'm worried that people won't adopt it and choose to just stick with plain jane devices (which won't drop the price on the cool stuff for us)
;)
There really isn't a lot of really great HDTV compatible stuff out there either. DirectTV is dragging their feet and the rest of the major players out there aren't exactly pushing anything terrible innovative either. Software for it is also pretty bad. I know a lot of people like MythTv, etc, but it could be a lot better.
There really isn't a efficient way to compress any 1080 streams either - you need loads of time, a fair bit of ram and a great machine - even then a 250gig drive fills up really quickly.
Also, and this is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine - is that with 1080i (and 720p), you can see if the camera isn't focused perfectly. I find this incredibly annoying. If the quality gets bumped up another couple of levels, this will be more noticable. I'm guessing this will be corrected as more and more people realize that it looks sloppy on the cameraman's part.
If you're bored, try and figure out storage requirements for the folks who film your favorite shows in 24p (BSG does, as well as a bunch of other shows) and then figure out the storage requirements for something recorded in this format
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
you can now get 16 times view of Oprah!
ugh, I think I just vomited on my keyboard
6.8ghz Laptop
I just bought an HDTV, don't make it obsolete so fast, ya bastards!!
I've had HDTV for a few years now and honestly I never was blown away. What I did get was a big hard to move cini-screen set that I'd be more then happy to part with for something better and thinner/lighter.
Its all about how they position it. You plasm screen owners might be a little harder to convince, but that resolution is a big jump and by the time the rest of the technology catches up you might be ready for an upgrade anyway (we don't have 21TB dvd's yet and at least here in the US streaming that kind of data to a regular home would be out of the question).
Anyway, its innovation, thats exciting.
Quack, quack.
7680 x 4320.....I'm not entirely sure that it would be good to have porn in THAT much resolution. I don't need to be able to count the creases in some guy's hairy anus :-)
And yet, there will still only be 3-4 programs on TV/cable/satellite actually worth watching -- no matter what the resolution is!
Homer no function beer well without.
hmm, who wants to guess which company will start screaming DRM!!!
..will it be before Hollywood demands copy protection?
Ok, I suck at math and all, but I can't be the first one who picked this up.
1920 x 16 = 30720 != 7680
1080 x 16 = 17280 != 4320
Also, sometimes more resolution isn't always better. I don't really want to see the exact number of pimples on someone's face.
That sort of stuff is visible even in this screen cap, which is in 720p and encoded with xvid (cap is from HBO's "Rome", BTW). I really don't want to be able to make out globs of makeup on someone's face. Ignorance is bliss I guess (teeny bopper pop stars would look terrible in this, but perhaps there is an advantage to having teens disgusted by the face of the latest coke snorting "musician")
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
THIS is why you don't want governments stepping in and saying Okay everybody you got five years to broadcast in X format and only in that format. Left in the free market, we would not have bound ourselves so tightly to something inferior to this (possibly).
Enough dataflo for an NTSC quality 3D hologram.
:)
In ten years, optical / quantum ought to be arriving to ordinary consumers. Or, maybe, entangled links : a block of transmitter photons entangled to reciever photons under the screen. And some quantumdot-like voodoo to read and display on a point-by-point basis.
If it's fast enough, they could record and retransmit wavefront data. => Holograms !
Made into thin sheets, you could "mod" houseware items / cars... spouses... pets... ?
A wall covered with the "retirement center" scene from Solyent Green would be neat ! And music from Zardoz, of course.
Geeze! Over kill? Who got this bandwidth?
Maybe with some heavy hardware compression chips - this would be cool,
but that's just too much data to be pumpin' through the air (or cable, or dish).
Neil Patrick Harris wouldn't say that about HDTV!
ever see the movie "40 year old virgin" thats an understandment to what im thinking about most slashdotters right now...go out and have a beer please! I know i will when i get off work. douches
I am not the biggest HD fan . I only see marginally better quality in HD. I am just wondering what rez is the one the eye really starts to get impressed by.
I have wondered why there aren't higher resolution TV's out there. It's because HDTV is the standard and I doubt we will see anything better come out. Kind of sucks.
I don't think the manufacturers will be coming out with 3000*2000pixel TVs.
Computer displays may play a key part in new display technologies. Since there is one resolution , I can see home theatre people eventually buying photoquality plasmas/lcds.
They seem to have forgotten to write a press release to go with this big story so I wrote it for them:
This is great news for ____! Eventually it will improve ____ for all consumers but initially it will be used in the ____ industry to improve ____. Sony, Samsung, and Toshiba have all announced they will be introducing their own versions, which will be available in 21__ and are eventually expected to saturate the market at prices as low as $...,...,... Said one executive, "We're incredibly excited about this. We have invested $...,...,...,...,... in this project and are very confident it will succeed and dominate the ____ market. The new technology will first be experienced by consumers in selected ____ during a special ____-enhanced presentation of Star Wars: Episode OMG.
Have fun filling in those blanks. I sure couldn't.
here's a reality-check:
res = 7680 x 4320
that's (7680*4320)/2^20 = 31.64 megabyte per frame
at the specified bitrate of 24gbps, that's ~100fps
to the point:
raw super hi-vision is 24gbps = 3gigabyte/sec
raw 720p hdtv is (1280*720*60)/2^20 = 52.73 megabyte/sec
this fits the numbers if you consider that super hi-vision has a frame size
32 times that of 720p, and a framerate 1.67 times that of 720p.
current mpeg2 as used in hdtv compresses raw hdtv into about
20mbps = 2.5megabyte/sec
so we get a reduction of 52.73 / 2.5 = 21.1 times
if we assume the same (probably better because the larger frame size
will allow larger macroblocks = better compression, along with the
higher framerate meaning less change (residual energy) between frame)
compression for super hi-vision:
(3*1024)/21.1 = 145.6 mb/sec = 1.137gbps
let's round that to an even 1gbps assuming our theoretical compression gains.
mpeg4 and/or h.264 would give even better compression, at the cost
of more complex integrated circuits needed to decode the stream (video
compression is very parallizable; there are no huge problems in
scaling up a hdtv decoder chip 40x or so, afaik), i would say to the tune of
~3x better compression. that's around 3-400mbit.
last thing i want to mention: multicast, over fiber. the bandwidth can be
made available at least in urban areas for a couple of super hi-vision
tv channels via forthcoming FTTH networks.
It still doesn't add up to 24Gbps but at least it makes more sense.
I suspect that people WILL be able to see this; I seem to recall that when 6 megapixel cameras came out, camera connaisseur John Dvorak wrote in his column that they were then hitting the effective resolution of 35mm film.
But movies have had some success at 70mm frames and IMAX frames that are each about 4X the pixel count, successively...I'm not sure that 33 megapixels is yet as good as an IMAX frame.
So even without ultraviolet-ray 18-layer disks, I'm imagining IMAX Theatres going digital by just mailing 10TB hard drives around the country in 2010. If it makes economic sense, that is.
Personally, I've held off buying any HDTV because I'm certain that all the various HDTV formats will eventually molder away in favour of 1080p as that becomes affordable.
The question is, 'what's next?' The now-hot-selling HDTVs will be worn out in about 10 years, and the relentless progress of digital monitors will mean that at least 4X HDTV resolution will be cheap and common by then. Will they go to that? Or hang on to 1080 as a maximum for another decade and
try to get people to upgrade to say 4096x8192.
There's no question that people will keep upgrading to the limits of human perception, where they just can't tell between the old model and the new. But I think that's a long way off.
The other issue is refresh rate - there's no question that moving pictures look much more real at 48 frames/sec than 24. Roger Ebert really fell for such a technology - just stick his name and "digital" into Google and you'll probably find the column. He was profoundly unimpressed with the digital projectors now being foisted on the industry, compared to a simple retrofit device that allows 48fps movies.
You've touched on a huge annoyance of mine regarding digital TV. Cable companies have created the marketing myth that "digital" == "flawless", and they compress the hell out of the signals on the digital channels in order to squeeze more of them into the service. (I'm not sure, but I suspect that satellite TV companies do this too.)
The result, as you say, is artifacts, sometimes so bad that they can completely ruin the the aesthetic experience of watching a movie. One of the most glaring examples I have experienced of this is the scene near the end of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, where the soldiers fatally injure a sniper who has already killed several of them, and then they discover that the sniper is a terrified little girl. The girl pleads in English to be put out of her agony. Joker (played by Matthew Modine) struggles emotionally to bring himself to do what she asks, and behind him (in true Kubrick style) we see a reddish-orange fire that throws a flickering light around the room.
Dramatic moment, eh? To bad it's completely ruined by the digital artifacts from the compression. The light from the fire is a distracting, scrambled, splotchy mess. Look, I'm not asking my TV to be equal to a theatre screen. It's just that going cheap with compression can make it not worth the bother of watching a movie on TV at all.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
that would be my favorite spec about this tech.
Case in point - I've watched OTA HDTV in flawless quality on a PIII-800, using an ATI 9600 series card to accelerate the decoding to a 1920x1200 LCD panel. Even baseline machines will be including powerful graphics coprocessors come the Vista generation.
Also, consider the architecture of a processor like the SONY/IBM cell. The DSP (digital signal processing) features that it provides will blaze through HDTV streams with far fewer Mhz than than a regular PC. Powerful DSPs can not only decode in realtime but can encode and transcode to other formats in real time as well, with far more efficiency than a regular PC. I believe SONY ran a demo where they were decoding something like 48 HDTV streams simultaneously using the PS3 version of the CELL. I expect this sort of tech to make it's way into regular PCs in coming years.
Speed really shouldn't be all that relevant in the long term, as processors are evolving to handle media intensive tasks with much greater efficiency.
...And which wonderful BroadCast Flag Enhanced+ CSSHDWMACPSRM protection scheme does this come with?
1 - The Maximum resolution of a standard 42in HDTV is 45 pixels an inch. Imagine 184 pixels an inch. Or a 168 inch wide screen!
2 - With a 168 inch screen you could display your TV, your Email, your PC, your CCTV and still have room for more on one screen
3 - A whole wall showing a hi resolution immersive environmental picture
4 - Technological advance that companies will develop for to fill the first 3 points
5 - Advance of super HDTV will lower the price of "standard HDTV" to the masses.
Any advance like this one can only further the true dream of an immersive information/mood/entertainment environment. Imagine developing software when all four walls of your office are your note pad!
I see this as helping HDTV adoption as it provides so many more oportunities for its use.
Karmady is the best medicine.
someone is going to start making converters of signals and formats cause I ain't buying no HDTV to replace the working 32" TV I have and certainly not going to buy this new fangled tech... to only then deal with the next latest and greatest tech video....
and that converter is gonna have to be less then $40 before I'll buy it.... Who loses? Well I don't see the commercials then do I?
Assuming it is only 24bit. 32bit would be 127megs. With a back buffer, front buffer, and z buffer it would be 380megs. With a 16bit per channel floating point back buffer it would be 506.25 megs for frame buffers!
With a 512meg video card you'd have 5megs left for your textures.
Give me 1080p and I'll be satisfied for now.
Whomever said that HDTV will be the standard for the next 50 years is exagerating a wee bit. Think about the internet connection you (might have) had 20 years ago. If you were BBSing it in 1985, it was probably with a 300 baud modem. The speed with which we can get home internet access today is exponentially faster than back then. It really isn't a difficult stretch to extrapolate another 20 years in the future. I wouldn't at all be surprised if we have multi-terabyte-speed pipes in our homes in 2025. The cost of storage per megabyte is dropping everyday. Computational power continues to increase. The speed available to customers for home internet access is increasing every few months. The spread of TVRs are slowly but surely eroding the control TV broadcasters had over us with the scheduling of our favourite TV shows. Bit Torrent will only continue to increase in use and, with each successive version, will only become faster and more efficient. All these factors point to a future where ALL media is online. Everything. Every last b-movie and celebrity Christmas album. The whole shebang. I, for one, am quite stoked.
16 1.5 Gbps signals
Completely offtopic, but yet... oddly on topic... random fortune cookie at the moment reads: "Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off the TV screen."
These are random... right?
I saw the SuperHiDef demonstration at the Aichi Expo this summer. Yes, the name sounds silly. Yes, the concept of needing something beyond the HDTV we already have seems ridiculous. But don't knock it until you've actually seen it for yourself. Mark my words, many of the people heaping sarcasm into this topic now will be the same people who will be craving a SHDTV-capable display for their next cool toy.
For those of you who don't know, one of the major attractions at the Aichi expo was the incredibly well preserved partial remains of a wooly mammoth. In order to see the mammoth, you had to sit through what was essentially a SHDTV sales pitch, after which you actually got to see a short SHDTV movie of scenes from around Japan. And only after all of that, and wandering through some antiquities dispay, did you finally get to see the mammoth. We happened to go on a really, really rainy day (not entirely surprising, as I was there during monsoon season), and were lucky enough to actually get a chance to go in (on a day where the weather wasn't terrible, the lineups would have been prohibitive).
We were making all kinds of wisecracks about the silly sales tactic, how we were literally a captive audience, "If I buy one, will you release me?" and all that sort of thing. What I mean to say is, by that point in the day, tired, soaked, snared into this unexpected sales pitch trap, we were very much what you'd call a tough audience. When we actually went into the theater to see the movie, we were set to rip into the experience with a fresh round of sarcastic venom. Every single one of us came out of the theater absolutely wowed.
The opening scene was of a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. It was utterly incredible. Every single leaf, every single branch, every single twig was defined with unbelievable clarity. It actually seemed to look three-dimensional, almost popping off the screen. For a moment, I thought they must have pulled the screen away to reveal a real tree behind it. There were other scenes, one of my favorites being a panoramic shot of a small Japanese mountain town covered in snow. You could make out incredible detail on tiny people way off in the distance shovelling snow. If you ever get the chance to see it for yourselves, I hope you take the opportunity, because it was a sight to behold.
I don't mean to say that this technology has many practical applications. Do we really need to watch cartoons, or sitcoms, or dramas, or porn, or home videos, at SHDTV resolution? Probably not. Would the nature documentaries and other subjects normally filmed in IMAX format look orders of magnitude more impressive if filmed in SHDTV? Absolutely so. I think HDTV will predominate for quite a while yet, while SHDTV will be used in specialty applications, maybe gaining market penetration in a decade or so, if ever.
Anyway, for those of you spouting off on this topic, I can safely say that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I hope you get a chance to find out just how wrong you are.
The whole idea of just one standard for TV is obsolete anyway. Just about every cable system offers broadband, and many offer "digital cable". The general-purpose PC, and specialized computers like TiVo are becoming more common. So instead of having just one standard for TV, it seems pretty reasonable to push codecs out to viewers once in a while.
OTOH, as far as broadcast over the air is concerned, digitial is all too often a joke. When analog goes sour, you get a little "static" or "fuzz". It's not too bad usually. When digital goes bad, the sudden cut-outs of sound, frozen images, and blocks appearing on the screen are much more annoying. We had a little analog TV for a while with a digital tuner. It responded to signal weakness by dropping out EVERYTHING and turning the screen blue, then flashing back to the picture when the signal was stronger. Oh please, bring back my snowy picture!
What would really be cool is a standard for specifying variable quality of analog signals, and a tuner that could adjust (or report that it isn't capable) of handling high-quality analog. That would be the best of both worlds.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Now THAT'S odd, I was just reading about this yesterday in the latest SMPTE Journal on my to-read pile. I think it was the July issue. Alas, it's not online and I finished it and threw it out.
Anyway, just like DVD-A and SACD are/will be failures, this 32 megapixel technology will be a failure. 1.44 Mbps CD audio is Good Enough for 99% of the people (and far better than the analog format previously available), and 19 Mbps HD video is Good Enough for 99% of the people (and far better than the analog format previously available). I don't think it'll even succeed as a studio/production format, it just struck me as too kludgy, like some of the original early 80's HDTV attempts.
One simple rule for its versus it's
Not only will I have to spend another king's ransom on a 1st generation "Better than HDTV-Ready" tv, they'll ask me to shell out $500 for a set-top box to decode the signal that won't be mandated by the FCC until my 1 gen TV is well out of warranty and totally fried. I'm guessing sometime around when my firstborn is in college, this technology will be relevant to the rest of us and we can all celebrate by burning our HDTV sets, our blue-ray dvd players, our ipod videos and our fossil fuel burning cars...why can't the industry just sit tight for a few years and let us get bored so that there is a more real demand? Why can't stuff get cheaper? Why do they keep bollocksing up my plans to have a disposable income? Upgrading now just means keeping up with the minimum rather than stepping up into a better model.
At first when I saw the listed resolution I thought that it was total overkill, that no one wold even be able to see anything near that detail. I own an HDTV (720p resolution, or 1280x720), and at a normal viewing distance you aren't missing a lot of detail.
Coincidentally though, I'm taking a class in visual perception and we've just been discussing optimal human visual acuity, specifically as measured with sine wave patterns. Maximum human acuity is about 60 cycles per degree of visual angle. One cycle in a sine wave can be roughly represented with two rows or columns of pixels, so you really can't do any better than 120 pixels per degree (which is also the approximate density of photoreceptors in the fovea, the highest resolution spot in the retina).
So what's a reasonable viewing angle? When developing 3D graphics applications I find than a perspective projection angle less than about 60 degrees requires getting pretty close to the screen for realistic perspective. This seems reasonable for a closest comfortable viewing distance. I know I usually sit farther away from my TV than this, probably less than a 30 degree viewing angle.
At 60 degrees this monitor has just about 120 pixels per degree (128 to be exact). At a farther distance the pixel density will be even higher.
In a practical sense this monitor still seems like massive overkill to me. HDTV is great for TV, and even computer screens will see considerably diminishing returns by this point. In a theoretical sense though, it might be the perfect resolution.
The ultimate plays for Madden 2006
Those big freakin wall sized panels like in Total Recall would work.
I for one welcome our Ultra-High Resolution overlords.
The eye has 6 million rods, that would be the equivalent of a 2450x2450 big screen. So does this system in fact give better details than we can possibly perceive?
next bext
audioLibre - freedom of music
Ebert on MaxiVision 48
Someday we'll all be negroes
Idiot.
I saw this thing at the World's Fair 2005 at Aichi... You could see EVERYTHING... Pores on people's skin standing in line to get in were visible on this thing! It was too good! It was way better than Sony's laser driven projector... Having said that, I'm still happy with my 24" SD TV. I'd say everyone should go see it, but the expo ended a few months ago... (And if anyone is wondering, the Mammoth wasn't all that...)
I'm not sure what Slashdot is doing posting this, but a couple months ago when it was news:
4 k/
o jector/
http://www.hdbeat.com/2005/09/27/the-next-hd-shd-
Also, you can get a 4k projector for your house RIGHT NOW.
http://www.hdbeat.com/2005/10/25/sonys-sxrd-4k-pr
NHK Working To Make HDTV Obsolete
Posted by Zonk on Friday November 04, @07:25PM
from the tech-doesn't-stand-still dept.
Television Technology
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at EEtimes.com Japanese company NHK has successfully demonstrated a live relay of 'Super Hi-Vision' television, which is 16x 1080i resolution -- 7680 x 4320!" From the article: "NHK developed a Super Hi-Vision camera equipped with 8 megapixel CCD image sensors that can take 4k x 8k images. In the field test, it sent the two cameras to a sea park and sent baseband signals without image compression using an fiberoptic network formed by multiple network companies. The signal of the total 24 gigabits per second was divided into 161.5 Gbps HD-SDI signals to sent using the DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplex) method."
That's not TV, that's a freakin' hologram.
Warp speed, Mr. Sulu--and don't look at me like that...I was really drunk and the tribbles had me confused.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
7680 x 4320 does not equal 8 megapixels on my calculator...
It's more like 33 Megapixels....
I hear these stories and I am rather surprised.
I have an antenna in my attic, and I pick up 8 UHF stations from 40 miles away perfectly. This is IMPOSSIBLE with analog. They break up maybe once every couple hours. If I look at the analog versions, they're very snowy and ghosty all the time.
I know digital goes abruptly from great to nothing, but in my experience, it is still great when analog is so ugly as to be bothersome.
As to digital TV being obsolete when it started out, it's just not true. You were never going to get HDTV over analog, giving over 5 channel slots to a single channel wasn't an option. So digital brings you HDTV and analog does not. That's a huge advantage.
Are you perhaps in a country that uses other than ATSC TV (the US uses ATSC over 8VSB for over-the-air reception, I hear ATSC over CODFM is even better)?
I know 8VSB is sensitive to multipath, it's a bit annoying. Getting a directional antenna should fix this for you though. The path to the transmitter I am pointing at has 1500+ft mountain ranges running parallel to it, so I figure I'm a pretty bad case for multipath and it works great for me.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Did you ever see scent of a woman? ..Did you ever see scent of a woman... Super-hi? That's the way to see it, it's just wacked.
ôó
Some doctors I've recently talked to say that the approximate resolution of the human eye is about 14 megapixels.... so... As with many new technologies, the p0rn industry will probably be the first to deploy this 33,177,600 pixel technology. I'm wondering just how sharply we (our eyes) will perceive this 33 megapixel technology???
BTW, for the math nitpicks, 7680 x 4320 equals out to 33,955,200 pixels, not 33,177,600.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Doesn't mean jack. The current HD feeds we get over sat and cable and ota are highly compressed hd-lite anyways. How about we convince the carriers to stop overcompressing the signal and then we'll talk about the next gen of hdtv.
This is great news for ____! Eventually it will improve ____ for all consumers but initially it will be used in the ____ industry to improve ____. Sony, Samsung, and Toshiba have all announced they will be introducing their own versions, which will be available in 21__ and are eventually expected to saturate the market at prices as low as $...,...,... Said one executive, "We're incredibly excited about this. We have invested $...,...,...,...,... in this project and are very confident it will succeed and dominate the ____ market. The new technology will first be experienced by consumers in selected ____ during a special ____-enhanced presentation of Star Wars: Episode OMG.
Have fun filling in those blanks. I sure couldn't.
This is great news for NOBODY! Eventually it will improve JACK-SHIT for all consumers but initially it will be used in the pr0n industry to improve the true crap quality of their actors and actresses, as you can see the genital warts now. Sony, Samsung, and Toshiba have all announced they will be introducing their own versions, which will be available in 21xx^n and are eventually expected to saturate the market at prices as low as ninety-nine ninety-nine ninety-nine!!!! Said one executive, "We're incredibly excited about this. We have invested countless taxpayer dollars in bribing legislation and patent offices for this technology in the creation of this project and are very confident it will succeed and dominate the non-informed market. The new technology will first be experienced by consumers in selected racial demographics during a special bionic-implant-enhanced presentation of Star Wars: Episode OMG.
Hope that was enjoyable. I filled in the blanks for ya.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Do you have any idea how hard it would be to store and edit such high resolution footage? :)
How about the costs to buy the cameras and broadcast systems?
HDTV is around to stay, for a little while atleast.
Obsolete means not useful any more. HDTV hasn't even caught on completely yet, and is still somewhat bleeding edge. Just because we have jet cars that can break the sound barrier doesn't mean that a new BMW is obsolete.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I saw a short movie clip created by Sony
at the Aichi International Expo in Japan,
which just ended several weeks ago.
The technology used there was similar to the one developed by NHK.
The screen was huge, measuring 50m x 10m (164' x 33'),
and the video was as crisp as it can get, with
three HDTV projectors producing seamless images
on that screen. The whole viewing experience was not even remotely
comparable to what I have ever had at any traditional movie theaters.
I cannot wait to see movies made with this new technology.
I also like the fact that it is NHK that is working on this technology.
it is the only public TV network in Japan and tends to create much
better programs than other private networks over there.
Does this mean we'll actually have to go outside to watch the movies instead of staying at home and waiting for the .torrent?
With wall-to-wall 4k x 8k displays you could "virtually" join two living rooms together and keep in touch with family far away like never before!
"TV makers are starting to be required to include digital tuners so that they" Why require it? Why not just let the makers include features if they decide the public wants them. This is getting ridiculous.
If you had a fiber connection to your house, and could watch this, well, that's all you could do with it. You won't be able to save (and pirate) something like this for many years. I wouldn't feel ripped off because *it's that much better* than anything you can download. I guess people would downsample and I would be happy to watch it for free at my current resolutions. Just thinking about 8-10 years ago when nobody's computer had the speed/storage to do anything real with television/movies; DRM wasn't a big issue. It would be nice, in a way, if broadcast/commercial tech leapt that far ahead of normal computers again. But for myself, I grew up with regular TV and will probably be satisfied with that for the rest of my life. If a show is good, it's good on regular tv, at the movie, in a book, as a play; the delivery really doesn't matter.
Really interesting technology where you start with a 24 gigabits per second signal and split into 16 signals with 161.5 gigabits per second... FEC 1/100 ? Don't think so. The HD-SDI or SMPTE 292 defines a 1.615gbps serial interface, et voila, math works again !
even use high definition TV any more.
The idea that this technology will be embraced in the next decade is rather optimistic, to say the least. Look at the history of HD. Sony demonstrated the technology in the 1980's. The US adopted an alternative digital standard in the early 1990's with conversion mandated to be complete by 2001. We are now in 2005, and we don't even have a frickin' recording format, let alone standardized broadcast! Sometime next year, the first recording formats will emerge, with a lot of blood on the floor (pick sides: Sony or Toshiba) and the studios will continue to push DVD's. Why? Because well over 70% of studio revenue comes from DVD sales. Movie box office accounts for less than a third of the cash they get from movies, and if you think the studios are moving away from DVD, think again! they like money.
Why can't we get people to focus on the real issues making television unrewarding? Excessive ads (or ANY ads on cable content), garish product placement within the programs, and in documentary shows, a terrible "sawtooth" exposition style adopted in reaction to channel-surfers wherein each commercial break is followed by a successively lengthier recap of everything introduced thus far.
The overall effect of these encroachments is that a given hour of television offers more repetition and a shallower view of the subject materal.
tone
tone
I get
2-1 (H)
4-1 (H)
4-2 (H)
5-1 (H)
7-1 (H)
7-2*
9-1 (H)
9-2
9-3
9-4
9-5
11-1 (H)
11-2*
14-1
20-1 (H)
26-1
32-1
36-1 (H)
43-1
44-1 (H)
48-1 (H)
54-1
65-1
66-1
I get 24 digital channels I guess, one is a bit glitchy (I need to turn my antenna). But the asterisked channels are useless channels that have no real content other than infomercials. Some also are in foreign languages. The eleven (H)s have HDTV content at times (mostly primetime and weekends). If I lived in San Franccisco proper, I'd get all but about 4 of these with "rabbit ears" on the TV top.
I didn't count them all before, because I don't watch most of them.
As to us falling behind in digital television, other than using 8VSB, I don't see how we're behind at all. There simply aren't 80 channels worth of content to have on free TV, that's just not how it works in this country. For starters, it is not allowed to bring in signals from remote areas and rebroadcast them. So operators cannot pad their channel lineup with "BBC1 London" or such.
As the other poster mentioned, most people in this country get about 3-5 channels. How many local channels do people get in Anglia, the Midlands or Cornwall? Here you have to pay to get more channels (cable or satellite), and I have 256 of those (I just counted), not counting about 200 pay-pre-view channels or 50+ audio channels. And a bunch of channels I cut because I don't like home shopping or country music. Do you have any free TV there? My understanding is you have to pay to even own a TV.
I'm glad you get a lot of free digital channels. People in big cities in the US also get a good number of digital channels with small antenna, although sadly our digital receivers cost significantly more than yours do (more like $300 instead of $100). However, for perhaps a bit more than they could spend on your license fee ($210/TV) an American two-TV household could get a decent cable lineup with 80 channels or so, and the digital decoder is included. Still, we can't do it just by putting an antenna up, they have to run a cable to your house.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The boxes you talk about with analog and such are not ATSC boxes, they're cable boxes. ATSC is pure digital.
As to ATSC being parochial and backwards, don't confuse popularity with superiority. Cheapness of DVB chips is because DVB is popular. But the popularity of DVB no longer means it is superior to ATSC than the popularity of VHS meant it was better than Beta. I do find the 6MHz fixation of ATSC odd, but that's not that big a problem.
And it isn't parochial either. ATSC was created in 1995. DVB-T was ratified in 1997. This falls along the same lines as saying the US is remiss in that we use phones that are incompatible with GSM. What these people don't understand is we had cell phones before GSM. I personally had a cell phone before GSM was activated anywhere in the world. The GSM people deciced to make a new standard that was incompatible with what the Americans had already done. (The US has since created at least 3 digital systems that are compatible with the existing analog setups.) And in this case, it's perhaps a bit of that. The EU could have embraced ATSC, instead they decided to create another new standard, although I can see that leveraging from the previous (satellite only) DVB standards had some value too.
I'm not a fan of SCART. I've used it. It's a standard connector, but I'm not a big fan of it. It's a big connector, a big cable, and even though the connector is standard doesn't mean the device you are attaching to will work anyway! Some device use SCART but only accept (or emit!) composite. That's probably less likely nowadays. Anyway, I know that RCA jacks aren't wonderful either.
US digital (as you see it) is taking off slower because few people use over the air here, and the FCC decided cable systems didn't have to carry the digital versions of TV channels. Cable systems view their digital offerings as premium, and they know customers prefer to use the tuners in their TVs over an external one. It's too bad no one (including the UK) standardized a tuner control interface so you could use an external tuner as easily as built-in one. Actually, I guess we just standardized that stuff with CableCARD in the US, although it isn't taking off.
Where digital has taken off in the US is in satellite. We've embraced that quite well, you just don't see that probably since DTV doesn't use standard boxes (yet).
Thanks for the info on the UK licensing. The website didn't make it clear. I assumed that since there were separate fees for B/W and color that you had to pay per TV. The site just didn't make it clear.
http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
For one thing, spectrum isn't "consumed". For another, it is expanding due to the use of compression of data.