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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. "
Title says it all...
Well, given how long it took HDTV to get out there, you should have 30-40 years of use before it goes obsolete.
The article says we might start to see these UHDTV sets in about 25 years. Although SDTV can be said to have started in the 1920s or 30s practically speaking it's about 55 or so years old as the transition to high definition picks up steam. (2006 will be the first year more high definition sets than standard definition sets are sold in the US.) With the rate of technological change and Moore's law it seems reasonable to me that the next generation will arrive in about half the time SDTV lasted.
Insert witty sig here.
Pitty money and time is spent on increasing the specs of something that is already in abundance.
As technology matures there's a race for bigger, faster, and finer. But this race is not eternal: in few years the sweet spot is hit and people are not interested in higher resolutions.
With TV resolution this sweet spot is already somewhere between DVD and EDTV, way below 1800p. So yea, don't expect "technology to catch up" in that respect, as the summary suggest, since noone cares for it to catch up in this way.
So, did I do my math right? /1024 gives kb /1024 gives mb /1024 gives gb
x*y*bytes per pixel*frames per second gives bytes per section
7680*4320*3*25/1024/1024/1024 = 2.3174 gigabytes per second
that's quite a chunk for streaming video. of course, there will be compression techs and other tricks, but that's pretty impressive.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
First, it's pre-announced. Then there's a lag between the neat idea exposure and mass-market reality. It took about ten years for HDTV of the dull 1080i type to become affordable (if you consider just under a $1K affordable-- and it will drop further soon).
/. to begin with.
Digital photography was pre-announced. Looked great, even at megapixel rates. Kodak scoffed, so did Fuji. Both hedged their bets and it's a great thing they did or they'd be in Chapter 7. It took about the same time from pre-announcement to mass market approval. Now you can go to Brookstone and get a 640x320 matchbox-sized camera for $50, and digital 'disposibles' are arriving.
Cool-it is anti-consumption. Do we need television AT ALL? That's a question still to be answered. I'm all in favor for advancing technology, especially if it feeds the poor and gives quality of life a boost. While an UltraHD TV might have only speculative value, it pushes the boundary, and that's what humanity is all about.
So fie on your 'fringe' technology PCs were 'fringe' when I was soldering together and wire-wrapping motherboards in the pre-IBM and pre-Kaypro days. What we did, goofy as it sounds, is the reason you can post on
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Mind you, in the '77 release, the Jedi _are_ the terrorists. Lucas seems to have got something of a bone to pick with Bush, judging from the heavy-handed subtext of the prequels, too.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
If you had a display that wraps completely around you, eg. "surround vision", then you certainly couldn't look at the entire display at one time, so it would be reasonable to have media that carried more data than the human eye can see.
Yes the human eye's ROD cells can detect single photons, but they are slow, colour insensitive, and of relatively low density at the fovea (the part of the eye which we usually use to fixate on objects with).
And still, it's completely irrelevant. Yes our eye may be able to sense very small amounts of light, but that's nothing to do with resolution; the eye must be able to pin point the location that the photon landed, and that is limited by the 6 million or so cones we have, and a lot of parallel/serial processing.
Where in my whole post did I speak about the brain?
Your brain usually doesn't say "pixel" even when you look at a screen with pixels large enough to see the difference. Just like your brain doesn't say "low frame rate", but "flicker".
And your quote from Wikipedia doesn't change anything from what I said: Your retina determines the resolution you get. The fact that this resolution is not constant throughout the visual field doesn't change that basic fact. Nor does the fact that you unknowingly move your eyes around in order to get a larger area in high resolution.
You simply don't get more information through your eyes than your retina gives you. The fact that your brain manipulates this information by filtering, adding from memory, and even modifying due to expectations, does in no way alter that fact any more than it does alter the fact that your TV has a limited resolution (despite the fact that your brain tells you there are people or things which move on the screen of your TV, instead of a rectangular array of colored dots).
No, you are the one who has no idea what I'm talking about.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The outline of the story of nine movies was written before any of them were shot
Does anyone actually believe this anymore? It became patently obvious by Return of the Jedi that Lucas was making up the story as he went along. What other reason would there be to reuse the plot of the first film? Blow up the Death Star? Where have I seen that before?
Or perhaps he actually meant, all along, for Luke and Leia to be sisters and for Anakin to have built C-3PO. That thing about Leia remembering her mother? All planned, even though Padme died at childbirth.
None of it was planned. It was all marketing hype, just like how the original trilogy would never be released on DVD.
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?