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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. "
And i just bought an HDTV last week.
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Also required blood to be sampled and only one life form to be detected in the room before it allows you to play your DNA proteced version of "Stars Wars IV - Remix 92 - The Jedi Beat The Terrorists (2020 release)".
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I want to see if it looks better than my computer monitor resolution.
The inventors were overheard as saying; "Big deal. IT'S THE CONTENT STUPID!"
Atleast books will always have a higher (mental) resolution, it's to bad nobody reads anymore.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
That's quite the resolution.
I wonder, can the human eye even see such high resolution; does it even matter at that point? I mean,
According to this page it would appear that each human eye is a 15 megapixel camera.
If my maths are correctish then 7680 x 4320 is 33 million pixels.
So then, the question is - does this mean that by adding both eyes together, at best humans have 30 megapixel resolution vision?
Could this be considered "full human" resolution?
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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.
you wait 40 years to upgrade and a week later you're obsolete.
what I hate about TV is how the specs are so hardware-dependent. all kinds of numbers and letters and if it differs by 1 character your thousands of dollars might have been wasted.
imo it should be more like computers: you basically have a processor that determines your data processing and a display device that determines your viewable resolution. almost everything else is software and thus improvements are continuous and ongoing. it's a much better model than upgrading every couple of decades, with a half-decade period when your TV is too good for the signal.
once TV is based on more internet-like digital technologies this will hopefully happen.
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.
"When we designed HDTV 40 years ago..."
Whoa! 40 Years ago!? Amazing! Crazy how long it took to go public/mainstream. I guess it's one thing to design something and quite another to build upon it.
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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
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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.
Seriously people, if you want REAL, then go OUTSIDE. That is true reality, you smell, taste, and see it all, with a unlimited resolution.
No, see you're missing the point. I don't want REAL LIFE. I want LIFELIKE. Because let's face it, no matter what happens in real life, I doubt I'm ever gonna have the opportunity to bend Elisha Cuthbert over the closest piece of furniture and give her the worst 30 seconds of her life.
But if we can make screens mimic reality, then we're one step closer to every twisted geek's fantasy - the Holodeck. And I guarantee you, Holodeck-Elisha is more open to experimentation. One just has to hope that Real-Holographic-Simulated-Evil-Lincoln doesn't spring to life and goes on a rampage, wrecking the ambience.
Meanwhile, CMDR Taco [deceased] writes on how playstations "neural implant connect-kinetic extremity dongle [N.I.C.K.E.D]...was 'actually just a rehash of the Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis controller.
>>>Scanning for I.D.I.O.T.S. >>>
>>>I.D.I.O.T.S. FOUND! >>>
The $3000 version of the PS4 is built specifically for Ultra HDTV! Pre-order now!
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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.'"
They should've called it "Very HD" and saved "Ultra HD" for the next one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, see you're missing the point. I don't want REAL LIFE. I want LIFELIKE.
You remind of something local journalists in my country started using way too much in news reports, odd given it's a nonsense.
They like to say that some actual event that happened in our actual world is "like a real reality show"...
"Driving on the roads with your car is like a real reality show".
There should honestly be minimal intelligence requirements for one to be a reporter, I think.
FWIW my eyes do not cooperate[1], so I do not see depth they way most people do. I can see movement sure enough, but my brain has to do wetware emulation to figure out how far away something is, and close up it sucks. As a result I can't catch a ball but I can estimate how far away a moving car is, but it helps if I know about what size the object is and I must use visual context.
To emulate how I do it, just close one of your eyes and do things that way. I can see out of the other eye, of course, but the brain treats it as peripheral vision unless I'm using it to focus on an object -- I can swap which eye I use to focus at will.
[1] I was born with one of my eye muscles screwed up, so I was the opposite of cross-eyed.
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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.'"
I've been paying attention too. I first saw HDVS in 1988. I never saw Hi-Vision, the first Japanese analog broadcast standard.
No, there was never a 1080P analog broadcast standard in the US. There never was any serious attention paid to delivering HDTV over the air in the US until digital compression came around. This is because it was expected to take 5 regular channels to send one HD channel. At this point it became a war between compressed 720p and compressed 1080i.
Both were considered the best that could be done correctly on a single 6MHz (14mbps) channel. Both contain the same amount of info, and it's not by accident.
As to your cable conspiracy, the FCC left cable alone. They didn't mandate must-carry for digital local channels. Additionally, note that cable uses the FCC-endorsed ATSC standard and that HD was not even available over cable until after it was available OTA. The FCC was in no way waiting for cable to take up the slack.
You're right that content providers decided they'd rather do 4 SD channels than one HD channel. Because of this the FCC put in place some crazy rule that says that if content providers provide additional content on those alternate channels that are not on the main channel, they must return the revenue derived from that content. I don't know if the rule is even enforced, but because of it, the alternate channels in my area are all either PBS, commercial-free content (often just weather radar or rolling news) or identical to the main channel except in format.
This was because these providers were not charged for this additional bandwidth and the FCC didn't want the TV stations essentially reselling it and competing against the FCC in bandwidth sales. This came into play after a few broadcasters opined that they would put data on the additional channels instead of TV and sell it to pager or data providers like the Microsoft "spot" watches.
HDMI and HDCP are not FCC mandated, and they are not required to view OTA ATSC content. Even barring of recording is not in place since there is no broadcast flag now. Oddly, the broadcast flag never even barred recording technically, it merely said that any device capable of receiving the broadcast flag must preserve it if it exports the content outside the box.
Yes, there is plenty of protection on BluRay/HD-DVD and you'll maybe have trouble recording HBO. But neither of those fall under the FCC's mandates nor the public airwaves.
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