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Enter The 2160p HDTV

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i'll-take-two-to-go dept.

Dr. Eggman writes "The Consumer Electronics Show is kicking it in high gear as Westinghouse shows off its 2160p or "Quad" HDTV. While enthusiasts pine for new 1080p monitors Westinghouse has stated that the Quad HDTVs, like the 52" on display, "does not really target the consumer market, but high-end industrial applications.""

37 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. How about by DJ.Flecktarn · · Score: 5, Funny

    High end industrial pr0n?

    --
    I see nothing wrong with five meals a day
    1. Re:How about by ettlz · · Score: 3, Funny

      "High-end industrial"? What, for those with a CNC machine fetish?

  2. I believe by maroberts · · Score: 4, Funny

    I shall make a case for my living room viewing to be a "high end industrial application" :-)

    --

    Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
    Karma: Chameleon

    1. Re:I believe by prefect42 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yawn. This isn't even that monstrous (if the summary spec is correct). IBM T221 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T221 gives you 3840x2400 and can give you 48Hz off a single card (using both connectors).

      --

      jh

    2. Re:I believe by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Informative
      Save your money for a UHDV living room. :)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHDV

      Super Hi-Vision's main specifications:

              * Resolution: 7,680 × 4,320 pixels (16:9) (approximately 33 megapixels)
              * Frame rate: 60 frame/s.
              * Audio: 22.2 channels
                          o 9 -- above ear level
                          o 10 -- ear level
                          o 3 -- below ear level
                          o 2 -- low frequency effects
              * Bandwidth: 21 GHz frequency band
                          o 600 MHz, 500~6600 Mbit/s bandwidth

      Hot damn!
      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    3. Re:I believe by ACMENEWSLLC · · Score: 2, Interesting

      >>Resolution: 7,680 × 4,320 pixels (16:9) (approximately 33 megapixels)

      With that resolution, you have more data than you can actually see, unless you have a super large monitor. Even then, you can't focus on everything.

      Can you imagine what you could do with zoom? That actor way off set, but still in the focal range, is picking his nose.

      Will this bring back those movies that showed split screens with the same scene at two angles?

    4. Re:I believe by BecomingLumberg · · Score: 2, Funny

      You could make a 5 foot, crystal clear shot of balls slapping an ass. *shudder*. 1080p is enough for me, and I have 20/10 vision.

      --
      If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
    5. Re:I believe by Jugalator · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Christ...
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein-coated_disc

      Bring me an edit window of at least 30 secs, Slashdot?

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    6. Re:I believe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Bring me an edit window of at least 30 secs

      I give you....the Preview button

    7. Re:I believe by jackbird · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Huh? That's a higher resolution than film is mastered at. Even 6k frames are only used occasionally on really complex and detailed shots, and the frames are 4k or 2k by the time they're burned back out to film. Heck, I think that might be more resolution than IMAX film recorders use, although I'm not entirely sure. Ridiculous, and doesn't entirely pass the sniff test.

    8. Re:I believe by takev · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've seen the demo of Ultra-HDTV at the broadcasting conference here in amsterdam a couple of months ago
      All I can say extremely cool. And all the people who say the eyes can not resolve this resolution, should wait to actually see this demo before passing judgment.

      The Japanese do know how to make a prototype, they had all the equipment working, nicely in 19" deskside racks, with pretty equipment inside. They had a camera on the top of the building feeding live (using IP over fiber) to the theater. They could distribute uncompressed, but also compress in real time, scaling in real time (they had a couple of these 2000 line LCD TVs around the building). Record and Playback (they show a 12 minute video of nature, streets in a city, monuments, etc).

      Very professional, it looked like you could simply buy it and use it turn-key in a TV studio. Although it may have been a little expensive :-)

      The only problem: if you have bad eye sight you experience the world as a blur. If you look at this picture you are focusing on the screen which is closer to you than the image suggest, however the image is completely in focus and thus you see the image much sharper than reality. Even with perfect eye sight you notice this with Ultra-HD. I think people in the CGI industry would call this hyper reality, I am sure if one would make a dramatic production using this technology one would like to use a lower depth of field.

  3. How to feed it ? by Rastignac · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What can one use to feed this beast ? Where to find very-very-HD contents ? (And what about the huge bandwidth and the huge storage needed ?).

    --
    -- Rastignac was here.
    1. Re:How to feed it ? by Erwos · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Content will always catch up. I remember when HDTVs first came out, people would whine constantly about the lack of even native 720p source material - you had your computer's output, and that was about it. But, after a while, content did catch up, and you can easily find 720p and 1080p source material - even streamed over the net. Same thing for this - for now, it'll be driven with dual-link or quad-link DVI. But in the future, if this hits the consumer-space, we'll see full-res content for it - I'm somewhat sure you can get that much resolution out of a new film transfer.

      --
      Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
    2. Re:How to feed it ? by AxminsterLeuven · · Score: 5, Funny

      What can one use to feed this beast ? Where to find very-very-HD contents ? Hook up four DVD players, with each disc containing a quarter of the movie's image. Then lign up your remotes on the coffee table and use the index and middle fingers of both your hands to press play.
    3. Re:How to feed it ? by iamdrscience · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They say it's not really a consumer device, so I would assume, if you had any use for a display like this, you would also be generating whatever content it would be displaying. The use that comes to my mind most easily would be people editing films. If you're working with a very high-def version of a movie that will eventually be transferred to film or projected with a very high-def digital projector, then it would be nice to see what the film is really going to look like with the definition those formats will have.

      Another thing though is that media always lags behind the hardware to utilize it.

    4. Re:How to feed it ? by Kjella · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ehm... that'd be four Blu-Ray or HD-DVD players, please. Four DVD players I can do with my current screen...

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:How to feed it ? by itlurksbeneath · · Score: 2, Informative

      Or display screens in a plant environment showing process flows, meter values and such. We have setups like this in the plant I work in and they use a wall of monitors (plasma screens running 1024x768, I think) to get all the information to a viewable state. The limiting factor appears to be just raw pixels - you can only make a font so small before it becomes unreadable, for example. With a higher resolution output device, the same information could be presnted in a smaller area, or use the same area to display even more information.

      --
      Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
  4. What he really means to say by Bacon+Bits · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "[D]oes not really target the consumer market, but high-end industrial applications." Translation: "It's damn expensive right now, and we can't produce enough of them at consumer prices to make a profit."

    --
    The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
    1. Re:What he really means to say by TheRealFixer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's not price that's going to prevent this from coming to the consumer market. Plasma 4 years ago was around $30,000 for the larger units, but the prices dropped pretty fast. The real issue for consumer adoption is bandwidth. Cable and satellite providers have enough trouble delivering decent-quality 1080i. And over the air broadcasts? Forget about it. The ATSC standard is 19Mbits with MPEG-2 compression. There's no way you're fitting 2160p in 19Mbits with MPEG-2 and have a picture that looks better than a 1990's era AVI. So unless a brand new broadcast standard is developed and adopted, that's not happening. Cable and satellite have the advantage of being able to go to MPEG-4. But even with that, DirecTV cripples their HD by dropping the 1920x1080 picture down to 1440x1080 so they can fit more content.

    2. Re:What he really means to say by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

      But even with that, DirecTV cripples their HD by dropping the 1920x1080 picture down to 1440x1080 so they can fit more content.

      Check out the following WP quotes:

      "HDV 1080i uses a pixel resolution of 1440×1080, but when displayed is scaled to an aspect ratio of 1920×1080 = (1440 × 1.33)×1080."

      "HDCAM, introduced in 1997, is a HD version of Digital Betacam, using an 8-bit DCT compressed 3:1:1 recording, in 1080i-compatible downsampled resolution of 1440x1080, and adding 24p and 23.976 PsF modes."

      "DVCPRO HD downsamples native 720p/1080i signals to a lower resolution. 720p is downsampled from 1280x720 to 960x720, and 1080i is downsampled from 1920x1080 to 1280x1080 for 59.94i and 1440x1080 for 50i."

      Unless you have some extremely fancy gear, you're not doing more than 1440x1080 anyway. But hey, it's nice to think you're getting 1920x1080 footage.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:What he really means to say by TheRealFixer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Your information is a little dated, and bit misleading. The Sony HDV 1080i is a consumer product, not a professional one. The Sony HDCAM is 10 years old. The newer HDCAM SR does full 1920x1080. And as I understand it, DVCPRO100 was intended more as an entry-level professional HD tape for news crews and the like, who aren't as concerned about full resolution picture as much as convenience and portability. Almost all modern professional equipment does 1920x1080. Most of what you see on stations like DiscoveryHD and INHD, not to mention film transfers like those on HDNet, are all done in full 1080i these days.

  5. for high-end industrial applications by Thansal · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yah.

    right.

    Who wants to predict howlong it will take for those old fashion 1080P sets to become outdated, and that you really must have one of tese new 2160p sets if you want to even THINK of keeping up with the jonses.

    As a quick note. I am actualy finaly ditching the first, and only, TV I ever had (making it around 14 yrs old now I think), a 20" CRT that had some sorta funky colour burns on the sides...
    I am replacing it with:
    My boss' old 20" CRT that works!

    --
    Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
  6. PS3 drivable? by mgabrys_sf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There was a lot made of the early specs of the PS3, one of them being it was capable of driving not one - but two 1080p displays in tandem. The potential of this being used in real-life led to it being dropped (so the story goes). If the PS3 was truely capable of driving two 1080p's wouldn't it be possible to drive a single 2160?

    I recall that many early 30 inch progessive display cards used two cards in tandem to spit the screen into two vertical halves. If the PS3 video system has the omph, could it be similarly done?

    Don't know how BIG the display would have to be to be ideal either. I recall that 1080p is barely perceptible with anything under 37-40 inches. I can only imagine the optimal size you'd need to see the advantages of Quad HDTV.

    1. Re:PS3 drivable? by RicoX9 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Doubling the horizontal and vertical resolution gets you 4 times the number of pixels. Even if it could drive 4 1080p screens, that doesn't mean the timing logic is there to actually make a picture that makes sense. Most likely you would end up with a completely scrambled picture off a separate set of signals meant to drive 4 1080p screens.

    2. Re:PS3 drivable? by joshetc · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, 2160p is essentially four 1080p displays. Hence them calling it "Quad HDTV"

    3. Re:PS3 drivable? by Kjella · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Don't know how BIG the display would have to be to be ideal either. I recall that 1080p is barely perceptible with anything under 37-40 inches. I can only imagine the optimal size you'd need to see the advantages of Quad HDTV.

      37-40 inches doesn't say anything without distance. If you're talking field of view, then 1080p is good for about 20 degrees and 2160p for about 60 degrees at 20-20 vision. And even if you have 20-20 vision, you only have that in a very tiny area in the center. Note that a 60 degree FOV means you're sitting closer than 1:1, maybe like 35" away for a 37-40" display. Either you need to sit a lot closer to your TV or have a huge video wall to enjoy 2160p. Of course, if you're used to watching films at monitor distance (not unusual for students in cramped quarters) then 2160p will work for you. That is, if you can find a source with that resolution (and no, 35mm film doesn't have 2000 lines of resolution).

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  7. Way to go Westinghouse by AnnuitCoeptis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    1280x1024 (1.3 MPix)
    1920x1200 (2.2 MPix)
    2560x1600 (4 Mpix)
    3840x2160 (8 MPix) => would be nice for our current 8Mpix Nikon photowork


    See, from the photographer's point of view any current consumer LCD is inferior (safe to rare Mac/Dell 30" 2560x1600 displays), but this Westinghouse offering would be really nice.

  8. Stop upping the resolution... by JFMulder · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... and bring us HDR dammit!

  9. Four shows at once? by adenied · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I know this is anathema to the Slashdot crowd, but I wonder if one could use this to watch four sporting events at once like sports bars do with big projection screens. There's enough HD feeds on most systems to make this look pretty nice. ESPN, ESPNHD, the various broadcast networks, FSNHD, NFL Network HD, INHD special events, etc. Just switch the audio feed around as needed.

    Also would be cool when they do ESPN Full Circle where you get the same game but with different camera priorities on ESPNHD, ESPN2HD, ESPNEWS, and ESPNU. That's a sports geek's dream! Talk about sensory overload.

  10. Re:1080p Monitor by holt · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I've often wondered why they bother putting speakers on every TV. If you're going to spend $5000 on a TV, you'd probably have a good sound system, so why even bother with the TV speakers.

    You know, I agree, but you'd be surprised how many posts I've seen on an AV forum (like AVS Forum where someone posts "I just bought a 72 inch HDTV. Can anyone recommend a good surround sound system for under $200?"

    I'm not sure that the difference between a descent set of TV speakers and a mid-range surround system is necessarily as obvious as the difference between SDTV and HDTV. For example, when I installed my new HDTV last January, my mom commented on how good the picture looked, but she tells us that she can't really tell the difference between my sound system (Paradigm speakers with Marantz AVR) and her sub-$200 5.1-in-a-box system at her place. Maybe she just has mud in her ears?

    As far as your comment about watching the morning news in surround sound, for me it's not the surround sound that makes it worth turning on the AVR. The quality of the sound is much higher than from the TV's speakers (which are actually supposed to be fairly good). If we're going to talk about saving money, I'm sure the sound system (speakers, amps, processors, etc) adds up to a couple hundred bucks in the cost of a TV like mine... and yet the first thing I did when I hooked the TV up was to disable the sound system in the TV menu. Oh well.

  11. Clever marketing... by inviolet · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Westinghouse has stated that the Quad HDTVs, like the 52" on display, "does not really target the consumer market, but high-end industrial applications."

    They make statements like this in order to position themselves at the high end of the consumer market. After all, the overmonied folks in the high end of the consumer market invariably fancy themselves "above the consumer market".

    --
    FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
  12. Re: Not just RED, also too low for Digital Cinema by wisebabo · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Westinghouse monitor is also, unfortunately, just a little too low for digital mastering/cinema applications. With the current paradigm being "master at 4K distribute at 2K" the monitor does not have the resolution for the mastering phase (4K = 4096x2160). That doesn't even begin to talk about the pixel bit depth, color space, gamma, etc. Also when the paradigm changes to "master at 4K distribute at 4K", then the film industry will really want 4K monitors for proofing.

    Since it is very close to the required resolution perhaps the original manufacturer could be induced to increase the resolution slightly. Then perhaps Westinghouse could use closely spaced LED backlights that are individually driven so that the display could produce high dynamic range (HDR) images (very high contrast ratios). Add the appropriate color/gamma controls to match the digital cinema color space standard and NOW you've got a display!

    Then again with all this I'm sure it will be NOT CHEAP.

  13. Re:1080p Monitor? Why? by Surt · · Score: 2, Informative

    1920x1080 = 2073600
    1600x1200 = 1920000

    I think you may be wrong about which way the 10% goes.

    --
    "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  14. Re:Great!! by Schemat1c · · Score: 5, Funny

    I know of only 3 in the 60 some homes that I am friends with... I have never had a home as a friend and you have 60. How does one become friends with a home?
    --

    "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
  15. Absolute Statements are dangerous by suggsjc · · Score: 2, Insightful
    and none are or will be higher than 1080p for the next decade at least
    Although it *may* be a safe statement, a decade is a long time in the tech industry. I'd be careful with absolute statements...but since your not backing/betting/advocating a specific product, then I hope for all of us, your wrong.


    2008 - Quantum Computing breakthrough
    2010 - Virtual Reality nears reality
    2012 - Mulit-TB personal storage
    2013 - 3D Displays begin to go mainstream
    2015 - Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft ready 4th gen consoles
    2016 - Duke Nukem Forever FINALLY released, but still only VGA resolution
    2017 - /.'er looks back to realize that post 10 years ago was mistake...

    I could have also put down for each year that /. predicts the "year of the linux desktop" but would have detracted from the overall post.
    --
    When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
  16. Re:Great!! by bazorg · · Score: 3, Funny

    Fire up your web browser, drag "home" onto "favourites".

  17. Re:Great!! by philipacamaniac · · Score: 2, Funny

    Fire up your web browser, drag "home" onto "favourites".

    Stupid Firefox. I tried this in Firefox and it didn't work. Where are the "favourites" in Firefox?

    (tongue firmly in cheek, karma overlords)