Slashdot Mirror
Blu-ray Gone In Five Years, Samsung Claims
schliz writes "Samsung expects Sony's Blu-ray technology to be superseded within five years, despite winning the high-definition format war in February." Maybe that means five years from now will be the perfect time to stock up on cheap Blu-ray disks and equipment.
I've often wondered why Slashdot editors don't RTFA themselves, particularly, why they don't go back to the original source article when it's readily available on-line. The text (not the headline) of the article makes it clear that first of all, Griffiths isn't saying Blu-Ray ONLY has five years left. He's saying it has AT LEAST five good years left, but less than ten, in his opinion. Secondly, the business about OLEDs makes it clear that the thrust of the timeframe discussion is with respect to a profit stream. That is, there are five good years of profits left in Blu-Ray, but in the future, Samsung sees OLEDs as a long-term source of profits. Which is reasonable. After all, CD players are still around, and Sammy still makes 'em, but they're not a major revenue source at this point. From that perspective, of hardware profits, they're basically dead, although from a software perspective, CDs are still the #1 media delivery mechanism.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
We do need more data storage capacity for HTDV, because even with Blu-Ray, there's too much compression. That's the cause of the usual annoying artifact that moving objects are blurred at the edges and stabilize a few frames after they stop moving.
Displays are currently ahead of transmission and storage. Right now, LCD displays are capable of 1080p at frame rates into the 70Hz range, and some game consoles can output imagery approaching that range. But the data rates from most video media can't get up there yet.
"Digital cinema", as seen in theaters, currently comes in 1080x2048 (compared to the 1080x1920 of HTDV), which digital cinema people call "2K", and 2160x4096, or "4K". But their frame rates are low, 24 FPS normally, 48FPS at best. The number to shoot for is slightly above 70; Showscan established in tests years ago that humans can't tell the difference between 70FPS and higher rates, and there really is a noticeable improvement in audience reaction between even 48 FPS and 70 FPS. So we should probably be going for 72FPS.
The future of storage and transmission may be FrameFree compression. This is a combination of motion detection and morphing for image interpolation. When it works well, the frame rate is effectively limited only by the display and decompression technology. It also allows generating slow motion video from regular video, and is used for that in sports applications.
So there's the market target: 4K, 72FPS display, framefree compression, a 150 inch screen, a Super Bowl stream with enough bandwidth, and a case of beer.