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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."
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? ;-)
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24 (gigabits / sec) = 10.546875 terabytes / hour
Thats 21TB for a standard-length movie! ~21,000GB! Foly Huck!
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HDTV adoption is slow at best, and consumers aren't going to move to a better format than that for many many decades.
One of the benefits of HDTV, as commonly deployed, is that it decouples the display from the source - e.g. you can watch an 1080i signal on a 480i SDTV screen, a 720p, or a 1080i, or hypothetically anything larger. My LCD TV accepts a DVI input feeding from 480i to 1080i, and it displays it on the 720p screen.
This decoupling is a major benefit, because if one of the satellite providers wanted to support this new hyper-format, they'd likely have a traditional DVI output, along with a new Super-DVI or whatever output.
The huge schism that happened between NTSC and HDTV never needs to happen again, and there is no reason why we can't continually scale up. LCD prices are dropping, and it seems entirely reasonable that large grids of high resolution displays will become economical within a decade.
1920 x 1080 = 2073600
7680 x 4320 = 33177600
33177600 / 2073600 = 16
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It still doesn't add up to 24Gbps but at least it makes more sense.
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.
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...And which wonderful BroadCast Flag Enhanced+ CSSHDWMACPSRM protection scheme does this come with?
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.
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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.
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