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."

Comments

A bit more info and obvious first application

[xmas2003]

There's a little more info on the Open House 2005 site (where it was demo'd) that includes a graphic and mentions that it "employs a 22.2 channel 3D loudspeaker arrangement to realize excellent sound field reproduction and a wide listening range" ... whatever 22.2 is, it sure sounds like a lotta speakers. EETimes didn't say when this would be actually available to end-users, but PCWorld wrote on June 16th "... the NHK says its system is unlikely to be commercialized until sometime in the next decade" so it will be a while.

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? ;-)

Re:A bit more info and obvious first application

[InvalidError]

This stuff was on Discovery Channel months ago... and NHK's plans are to use it for movie theaters. Availability for home system was not discussed and it will certainly take a while, if it ever does get there. The DC overview of the UHD system did not say much about the audio system that went with it though. (Nor did it go into any sort of details about how the system was setup for the demonstrations.)

Per hour

[Punboy]

24 (gigabits / sec) = 10.546875 terabytes / hour

Thats 21TB for a standard-length movie! ~21,000GB! Foly Huck!

Re:That's a bit of an overstatment...

[ergo98]

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.

HDTV was born obsolete

[istartedi]

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.

This would be the limit of perception

[Arkaein]

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.