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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? ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
still can't get the EPL matches I want though, dammit
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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 It will be the standard for the next fifty years, just as we've stuck with the outdated "standard" we have now for however many decades.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.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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.
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
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
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
A laser based device would be the easiest and best choice. We do have the ability to direct lasers with extreme precision and excellent accurate repeatability. However, you might want to clear away an entire wall of one room, do it over in silvered white paint, and forget about using a cone of space starting at the projector and going across the room spreading to the whole wall. Now you have a real good reason to get going on remodelling the basement to make a TV room.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
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.
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.
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
6.8ghz Laptop
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.
1920 x 1080 = 2073600
7680 x 4320 = 33177600
33177600 / 2073600 = 16
FC Closer
This might work: http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/vizcor. htm
I saw this thing in person. It's amazing.
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.
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.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
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.
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"?
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
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...
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
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.
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.