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. "

Comments

Re:Great...

[drinkypoo]

The second limit is in your eyes. You simply don't get more "pixels" than your retina provides.

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:

Humans and other animals do not look at a scene in a steady way. Instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental 'map' corresponding to the scene. One reason for saccades of the human eye is that only the central part of the retina, the fovea, has a high concentration of color sensitive photoreceptor cells called cone cells. The rest of the retina is mainly made up of monochrome photoreceptor cell called rod cells, which are especially good for motion detection. Consequently, the fovea makes up the high-resolution central part the of human retina.

By moving the eye so that small parts of a scene can be sensed with greater resolution, body resources can be used more efficiently. If an entire scene were viewed in high resolution, the diameter of the optic nerve would need to be larger than the diameter of the eyeball itself. Subsequent processing of such a high-resolution image would require a brain many times larger than its current size.

In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Seen it, awesome.

[JFMulder]

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.

Re:25 years sounds about right

[Catbeller]

"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.

Re:The final resolution jump?

[pz]

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.