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Surgeon Performs World's First 4X HD Surgery
docinthemachine writes with word of some "research just presented at the 65th ASRM on 4K surgery. Using bleeding-edge Hollywood 4K cameras coupled to laparoscopes, surgery was performed in 4K, or 4X the resolution of HD. Since laparoscopy is performed while viewing on a video monitor, this is a huge advancement of resolution and clarity for the surgeon. It only took a million dollars of projectors to show it to the audience."
4x HD may be new for video imaging, but other medical imaging techniques have used higher resolutions forever. >HD monitors are quite common in medical applications, too.
Red One only outputs 720p, so they are not going to use the full 4k resolution while previewing.
I have worked with Red One many times. Somewhat buggy software, camera crashing mid turning over.
With Hollywood, 4K refers to the horizontal resolution. With HDTVs, 1080p means the vertical resolution of 1920x1080. Therefore, it is approximately twice the resolution in the X dimension.
Well, actually, it's around 3.5 HD, but it's the thought that counts.
This baby is awesome. I get to look at tons of displays for work and this one still takes the cake- it's made by Barco, is incredibly bright, has a built in calibration puck, comes with some decent software (ie, easily 'configured' for our purposes), and all around blows the socks off of everything on the market.
Don't mind the $16K price tag.
The diffuser used is so clean you could eat off it- none of that nasty subsurface artifacting that looks like dust on your screen (speckle). Just pure, rich, saturated colors that are accurately represented with no TFT structure to worry about.
Now, IBM had the T221 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors) which had a native resolution of 3840x2200- at 200ppi- so that your eyes could never make out the substructure of the pixels. Best of all the monitor had hardware interpolation- it could be used at 1/2x to basically present the user a clean screen with nothing to distract your eyes from. IBM did this back in 2000!
4K is roughly 4,000 pixels across, not 4X "HD", which is probably assuming HD to be defined as 1920X1080. 4x HD, if you multiply each dimension, would be 7680x4320, a lot higher. I did see a demo of an 8k system earlier this year at NAB, quite nice on a large screen. Downsampled to 4k on a smaller screen and it was jawdropping. now if overall you mean four times the data, then yes, because it's roughly x2 in each dimension in two dimensions.
We've always used the horizontal pixel resolution to define filmout resolutions for cinema. (2k, 4k, etc.) Consumer product manufacturers use the retarded "megapixels" number so it sounds larger and more impressive. (multiply width x height for total pixel count).
I'm impressed that the camera optics they rigged into the laproscopy procedure had enough fidelity to make a 4k image worthwhile from such a small imaging source.
The RED system is the current darling of high end 'indie' filmmakers, TV shows and commercial producers everywhere where 4k is desirable, while the Canon 5D Mk. II is being used extensively for 2k owing to its full frame, exceptionally sharp sensor combined with Canon's unbeatable lenses, despite the fact that it is primarily a still camera. Both were all over the place at NAB this year, and I have the 5D Mk. II myself. The tools are getting cheaper and better every year and a lot of the old names in broadcasting are fading away...
--M
720p ought to be enough for just about anybody.
We should ask, why do we have 1080i and 720p? Because viewing tests showed that at three picture heights, these resolutions pretty much maxed out the human visual resolution. There was not much to be gained from increased resolution.
Now if you view closer than three picture heights, higher resolution becomes important...