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.)

Re:A bit more info and obvious first application

[diablomonic]

What is annoying to me is that even with all those pixels, which is coming close to enough to properly completely trick the eye (some people estimate that the eye can see somewhere round 5000 by 10000 "pixels" accross our full field of view, maybe more for some people), they have left it as ~25 frames a second (~32,000,000 pixels * 3 bytes of info per pixel (but why only use 24bit true colour when your going for this quality?) is roughly 96 MB per frame, and the uncompressed total was ~2.5 GB per second, which is roughly 25 frames a second.

I realise that they most likely did this becouse it would be damn hard to get any higher with that amount of data per frame, but still, if your someone who is designing a spec and aiming for a new super dooper standard, PLEASE UP THE FRAME RATE. 25 FPS SUCKS for fast action.

also, anyone who is going to argue with this and say 25 is all you need, please read and understand this before hand, or else shut up: www.100fps.com

The picture is great...

[Chocolate Teapot]

"Super Hi-Vision has huge information and was difficult to transmit. Using 16 waves on optic fiber, we succeeded a live relay over a long distance."

...but the sound is still a little disjointed.

Random thought

[amliebsch]

"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."

What color ray is that disc going to need? I'm guessing puce.

Re:Random thought

[Punboy]

For this I am assuming 1cmx1cmx5mm for the size of Samsung's 16Gbit flash chip. This is probably slightly larger, but we must include the board on which they are soldered

People made do with huge VHS tapes for years, right?

So lets see how much storage we can cram into a VHS tape using flash.

first lets gets the area of a VHS tape... 7 3/8 x 4 1/16 x 1. Thats in inches. So, lets use Google to calculate that into cubic centimeters.
Thats about 491 Cubic centimeters.

Now lets see how many cubic centimeters a single flash chip is.
Thats 0.5 cubic centimeters. Now lets divide 491 by 0.5.
Thats a whopping 982 flash chips!

Now, how many gigabits of storage is that?
15,712 Gigabits of storage space in a single VHS tape filled with 16Gbit flash. Wow. What is that in GB?
1,964 gigabytes

Ok, so we'd need 10 of those for a 2-hour movie. But you have to remember, thats uncompressed. If we compress it, we just may get a single movie into a 1,964GB flassette (flash-cassette, something i just made up).

Woot.

That's a bit of an overstatment...

[Kjella]

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.

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.

Per hour

[Punboy]

24 (gigabits / sec) = 10.546875 terabytes / hour

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

OK, cool.. but...

[loraksus]

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 ;)

Re:HDTV has been obsolete since day 1

[MichaelSmith]

HDTV isnt the future. A PC, Gnutella, and a HD2 projector is.

Yep. There are too many layers in these TV specifications. What field are they in? Video or communications? There will be a need for ultra high res video in the future, but TV is dying.

Every evening TV competes with /. for my time, and mostly loses. And I am not one of those who exhaust themselves on World of Warcraft until 3am then stagger into the office and pretend to work.

The Broadcasting model came out of the basic physics of radio transmission. We are not limited by that anymore, so broadcasting is out.

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.