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Ultra HDTV on Display for the First Time
fdiskne1 writes "According to a story by the BBC, the successor to HDTV is already out there. The resolution? 7680 x 4320 pixels. Despite the 'wow' factor, the only screens capable of using Ultra High Definition Television are large movie screens, and no television channel has the bandwidth needed for this image. Some experts, in fact, say the technology is only a novelty. Until the rest of the necessary technology catches up, the only foreseen use for Ultra HDTV is in movie theatres and museum video archives." From the article: "Dr. Masaru Kanazawa, one of NHK's senior research engineers, helped develop the technology. He told the BBC News website: 'When we designed HDTV 40 years ago our target was to make people feel like they were watching the real object. Our target now is to make people feel that they are in the scene.' As well as the higher picture resolution, the Ultra HD standard incorporates an advanced version of surround sound that uses 24 loudspeakers. "
--insert obligatory slashdot reply here saying moore's law doesn't have anything to do with tv resolution--
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I'm sure the MPAA is already working up something to restrict this. After all, how would you think you'd have a right to get all those experiences for free? :-)
BTW, it's not true that you get it with unlimited resolution. There are several limits to the resolution you get. First is the wavelength of light. Red light has a wavelength of about 800 nm, so you can't see any more than that in red. Violet light has about 400 nm, so you have twice the resolution there, but it's still limited.
The second limit is in your eyes. You simply don't get more "pixels" than your retina provides. So even the light wavelength limit is actually purely theoretical. Note that you cannot offset this by going arbitrary close, because below some minimal distance your eyes won't focus any more.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Just wait a few more years for WHUXGA...
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HUXGA
WHUXGA 7680×4800 16:10 37M
WHUXGA an abbreviation for Wide Hex[adecatuple] Ultra Extended Graphics Array, is a display standard that can support a resolution up to 7680 x 4800 pixels, assuming a 16:10 aspect ratio. The name comes from the fact that it has sixteen (hexadecatuple) times as many pixels as an WUXGA display. As of 2005, one would need 12 such displays to render certain single-shot digital pictures, for instance a 14836 x 20072 pixels image created by a Betterlight Super 10K-2.
This is pure nonsense, because our brain doesn't work in pixels. It works in concepts, and what you think you're seeing is actually constructed in your brain from a combination of what your optic nerve feeds to your brain, and what you remember about seeing similar things before. YOU DO NOT PERCEIVE REALITY. You perceive your brain's model of reality. This is the most important thing to remember about your senses, and most people have never heard it or are all too willing to forget and pretend that yes, they are directly connected to reality.
Do some research on saccades... but here's the meaty part of the wikipedia page:
In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ultra-HDTV's resolution is comparable to 30mm and 70mm film. This will probably be what's adopted when digital projection becomes mainstream in theaters.
No, I will not work for your startup
I was told the downlink for the live camera was sending 52 Gbits/sec, which isn't quite the figures the others were coming up with. The data might have been 16 bits per channel. The camera was about a foot cube, which is pretty good as a blimped IMAX camera is the size of a small car.
I don't know where the figure of not being ready for 25 years comes from. The project never had a time to manufacture. I would imagine if there was demand, it could be ready a lot earlier.
Does it replace IMAX? I am not sure. I would like to see it show footage scanned from the original "North of Superior" footage. I have seen a strike from the original negative of that, and I remember the image being so impressive that you felt the tilt when the aeroplane cornered: you believed your eyes over your inner ear. It would be interesting to know if this rig could do the same.
I expect that video will be 5 bytes per pixel by the time this comes out - already the latest version of the HDMI specification allows for 36-bits per pixel, which would require 5 bytes.
So 7680 x 4320 x 5 at 60fps = 9.3GB/s.
Another comment said that this was 25 years away, although I wouldn't be surprised if it was only 15 years away the way things are progressing. 9.3GB/s is offered on even low-end graphics cards these days, but the bandwidth problem is between the player and the display, i.e., the HDMI equivalent specification of the time will have to carry that much bandwidth.
HDMI 1.3 currently carries over 1GB/s on its interlink, so that's probably not a worry ether.
I've seen this at NAB this year in Vegas. It's awesome. The sound system has 9 speakers on the upper layer surrounding the crowd, 10 middle speakers around and 3 lower speakers right in front, with two LFEs. It actually uses two projectors IIRC, one for chrominance and one for luminance. They showed a bunch of footage filmed for the occasion. Since it came from Japan, it involved a lot of soccer games, Japan landscapes and.... Ultra High Def sumo fat wiggling. At the end, they showed real-time footage from a tower on top of the convention center. It was pretty cool, tough you could see some noticeable compression artifacts in some places.
"It's just that only around now has technology reached the point where HDTV is practical. (Wasn't the original HDTV rollout years something like 1997, 2000, 2003, and so on until technology became cheap and available?)"
I'm probably the only one here who is 1) old enough to remember, and 2) actually paying attention to the HDTV fiasco from 1985 onwards.
Analog HDTV was rolled out in Japan in the 1980's. A bit stung, the American television manufactures and the networks hammered together a proposal to broadcast 1080p in the following way: standard def over the usual VHF channels, while the HD component would be broadcast over unused channels. Thus, Channel 2 CBS would go out as normal, while an HDTV set would take that signal and add information broadcast over channel, say, 3. All analog. All broadcast. The rollout would have been around 1990 or so.
A funny thing happened. Digital video. The broadcasters saw what digital compression could do for them. Why just one channel, using all that bandwidth, when we can now use the same two channels and broadcast 4 programs simo? We promise that sometimes we'll broadcast in HD; just most of the time, we'd like to make more money with four low-def channels. And they demanded, and got, 1080 (i), to halve the signal and enable more channels on the side thereby.
And their wish was granted. These were the years of no-regulation, after all. The issue of public ownership of the airwaves was going bye-bye, and the government would like to auction off those frequencies anyway, which leads us to
Cable. Since so much programming was going over cable, the Gov decided that public regulation of public airwaves was silly and undermining competition. So long Fairness Doctrine, so long limits on corporate ownership and monopoly control. And so additionally, why force public airwaves to go digital when cable could deliver it so much better than they?
And network TV didn't really want to pay to upgrade, either, so that slowed it down a lot. Delay after delay...
THEN the kicker. The "content owners" saw that in the digital age they had a chance to lock down signals and force people to pay each time they accessed their "property". They wanted taping to go away as well -- they hated VCR's and almost killed the tech in 1984. They could win this one, and so was born the Broadcast Flag, a digital lock on transmissions that controlled the use of the program. Cue a big delay as HDMI, HTCP and all the other locks were developed and approved by the "content" industry.
Now... it's the 21st century. almost 20 years late, and we've crappy 1080i signals going over the air, infomercials clogging all those channels we can access for free, and we can't record the standard 1080i signal.
Remember, the public airwaves are supposed to belong to we the people, and the broadcasters and producers are supposed to dance to our tune. Somehow they are now the masters, and we those begging for mercy.
Exactly. If you read his original Journey of the Whills scripts, it is readily apparent he had no master plan, or at the very least never stuck to it.
Han Solo was a late addition, that up until shooting was supposed to be killed by Jabba. Star Wars was supposed to be much darker. We used WWII films like Dam Busters as inspirations, as well as Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. Both of those he credits. But he also lifted heavily from Dune, which he doesn't credit.
The early drafts focus more on the spice trade on this remote desert planet, and the native population has supernatural powers derived from spice. A very Harkonnen-esque (and human) Jabba was the villian who controlled the spice.
Skywalker was a general of royal lineage, raised for greatness and a veteran of the Clone Wars.
And every time Lucas made announcements about what group Episode 1 would cover, and then 2, and then 3, the finished product was considerably different, because he kept changing his mind.
I'm a huge Star Wars fan, but we overlook how characters that we were told would be major characters in the trilogy like Captain Panaka and Ric Olie suddenly disappear, or how Aura Sing was going to be a major character, and then disappears.
The Force Ghost thing was going to be fully explained, with Qui-Gonn showing up in 2, and then explained in 3 with him showing up in 3, and then he never shows up.
George Lucas even admits the sibling relationship between Luke and Leia was a very last minute thing while shooting Jedi, because he didn't know how Vader would anger Luke during their final duel. So at the last second, he invented that relationship.
We credit him for the universe and the master plan, but I'm not sure he has one, or ever had one.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Could this be considered "full human" resolution?
IAAVN (I Am A Visual Neuroscientist). The answer to your question is, "no." The article pointed to claiming 15 million pixels specifically states the pixels are variable resolution. The photosensors in the central part of human (and primate) vision are packed at a much, much higher resolution than those at the periphery. The standard resolution in central vision for people with 20/20 vision is about 3 minutes of arc; at 3 degrees away from the fovea, this drops to 1/2 that figure; and at only 20 degrees eccentric (about two fist widths held at arm length), it's at 1/10. (If you've never heard that vision is variable resolution, try this trick: open a book or newspaper and stare at a single word in the middle of a paragraph; then, without moving your eyes, see how far to the left, right, up and down, you can read. You will find that the limits are astonishingly narrow. Evenly sampled high resolution vision is a powerful illusion based on the extreme resolution we have in the central part of vision, the ability to move our eyes, and some incredible circuitry in our brains.)
More importantly, saying you have N by M pixels alone doesn't give visual resolution, it gives object resolution: it is not possible to resolve individual pixels in an 8x10 photo printed at VGA resolution held 10 meters away, despite the relatively low resolution of the image. It is necessary to know not only the resolution of the image but the viewing distance as well to be able to say if the combination approaches the limits of human vision.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
It's not that simple, mainly because the human eye's resolution isn't uniform. Basically, because of the fovea, in the center of our vision we have an area about 2 large (4 times the appearant diameter of the moon) offering us in the area a resolution of about 28" (seconds of arc), the resolution outside of this area being lower. Since it was projected on a 7 x 4 meter screen, each pixel is about 0.9 mm x 0.9 mm.
Which means that if I got my maths right, you would have to be 6.94 meters (almost 23 feet) away from the screen to have your maximum eye resolution to match the screens resolution. Farther than that the resolution of the screen would be too fine for it to be even needed.
I know this isn't a yes or no answer to your question, so to answer it we can say that if you're less than 6.94 meters away from the screen your eye resolution is still finer than the screen in some parts. Oh and someone tell me if I got my maths wrong.
You just got troll'd!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
In Astronomy, you can drastically increase the resolution of a picture you're taking by taking a dozen pictures spread out over a large area. If they're at the same time, then you can interpolate the missing data and produce a *really* high resolution picture. I'd be surprised if we aren't subconsciously doing the same thing with our eyes.
I sense you misunderstood about high-resolution imaging in astronomy here.
(1) The resolution of an image is primarily determined by the optics, not the detector.
The sampling rate of the said image differs by what numbers of pixel elements you
choose to use.
(2) You don't make a high resolution picture by "dithering" or "interpolating".
What you are doing (describing) here is to reconstruct the true photon distribution
obtained with your optical system (to beat out Nyquist limit). At the end
unless you deconvolve the image, the resolution after interpolation stays
exactly as expected theoretically by the optics. You just have finer samplings
of an object taken in the image.
I know this is a bit too much for today's slashdot audience to digest, but...
My point, which you handily missed, is that you cannot talk about vision without talking about the brain. Vision doesn't live in the eyes, or even in the optic nerve. That's simply where the data used for vision comes from, and where the preprocessing occurs. Vision exists in the brain, and your brain composites data from your eyes and from memory to produce an internal representaion of your surroundings that you perceive as visual data.
As such, talking about the resolution of the eye is, while not meaningless, at the very least exceptionally misdirecting.
Let me give you an example; perhaps you have heard of retinal implantation, which has successfully given partial sight to people whose retinal surface is either damaged or was ill-formed. The original implant was a four by four grid of receptors; each receptor is basically a photovoltaic solar cell hooked up to an electrode. The electrode conveys the electrical impulse to the optic nerve by way of the retina. This four by four monochrome element was sufficient to allow the recipient to find a doorway, recognize it as such, and walk through it without running into anything.
Now I think we can all agree that it is not possible to pick a doorway out of a sixteen pixel image, even with gray scales. Maybe a 16x16 pixel image, but 4x4 isn't diddly shit. However, your brain controls your eyes without your conscious input in order to build a more complete map of what you're looking at. Even when you believe yourself to be staring intently in one direction, one or both eyes may be jittering in order to build a better image.
And what you said is still complete nonsense because your brain, if anything, determines the resolution you get. Not your retina. The complexity of the image in your mind is limited not by any properties of your retina (the clarity is, but only due to ability to focus, or lack thereof) but by the characteristics of your brain. I'm tempted to insert the word "physical", as in physical characteristics, but honestly we know so little about the mechanisms involved in vision that it would be a fairly unfounded statement. Still, it seems likely that the overall complexity of the brain (hard to measure, in the case that quantum effects are significant, and some research points that way) is the limiting factor. We know it's not the number of elements in the retina.
Good thing I never said it did; nor, in fact, did you say it didn't. It's also true that our eyes/brain can distinguish detail finer than a pixel on an average-size HD display; some of us can discern the difference in quality between 300 and 600 dpi; pretty much everyone can tell the difference between 150 and 300; Anyone who can't see a difference between 75 and 150 dpi (or ppi, or whatever measurement we're using today) is probably using a screen reader.
The number of rods/cones on your retina very likely determines how quickly you can look at something and get a good picture of it, but it would seem to have very little to do with how clear an image you can build in your mind.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"