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Beyond HDTV
The Hub writes "The Economist writes a thoughtful article about the next generation of HDTVs and how they will provide resolutions beyond 1080p. The drive for higher resolution is driven in part by the demands of 3D content. Also, some see streaming higher resolution content to the home as a way to make up for declining DVD sales. This would mean the studios would have to better embrace services such as Netflix or stream directly to the consumer. Mind you, picture quality is driven by more than the number of pixels."
I would venture to guess that 80%-90% of the people buying HDTV's are doing it either because their old TV broke and it's the only thing available, or because they heard it was cool from a friend and wanted it for their Superbowl party. Either way, almost no one really understands it or even knows how to get the most out of all that resolution as it is NOW. We're talking people who buy 32" HDTV's and sit 10 feet away from them, thinking they're getting "high definition." We're talking people who hook up DVD (and even blu-ray) players to their HDTV's with composite cables. We're talking people who still have the same SD cable box they've had for years, thinking that the channels "really look better now in HD."
Joe isn't even ready for 1080p. This whole "let's add even MORE resolution" thing is just industry hype. It's Sony and Samsung thinking that if they just keep adding new gimmicks that people will constantly trade up their TV's like they trade up their computers. Joe Sixpack already has a perfectly good HDTV that he isn't even using to its full potential as it is, but they want him to go out and buy a TV with a resolution that he would need a magnifying glass to even appreciate. Welcome to America!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"The drive for higher resolution is driven in part by the demands of 3D content."
I was unaware that 3DTV was really taking off. 1080p on a bright screen is already a lot for my eyes to take in. Increasing the resolution while throwing the 3D sensation into the mix is sure to overload my visual sensory equipment. Hell, I get a headache just playing the 3DS for a few minutes, and that's by no means high-res.
At some point, displays have a high enough resolution that the human eye can't tell when the picture is any sharper. We've got to be getting close to that, no?
The way 3D TV works now, is they cheat, and squeeze two pictures into one image. That needs to stop.
Apple's "retina" display gets its name, because the pixel size is small enough, that when viewed from arms-distance, has a small enough angle that the human retna can't distinguish individual pixels. Going any smaller won't by you anything.
At what point does does this happen with - let's say a 52 inch TV, in my living room with a 12' viewing distance?
Do the demands *of* 3D really matter when there is such a low demand *for* 3D?
Instead of increasing resolution they increase bit rates and frame rates to make the video quality better? Is resolution really the limiting factor on picture quality at the moment?
Too bad there isn't a huge demand from the users for this high resolution demanding 3D content.
How does this make up for declining DVD sales? When I buy a DVD or BlueRay it costs between $10-$30. Am I going to be paying anywhere near this much for streaming high definition content? I have an Apple TV today where I can "rent" HD movies for somewhere along the lines of $4. I've done this twice, because renting regular resolution DVD's and low-quality streaming from Netflix is just fine with me. It would be nice if the quality was better, but I'm definitely not going to shell out much cash for it.
As opposed to the demand for 3D content. Actual demand is negligible. People are playing SD DVDs and SD streams on 1080p screens while Blu-ray whithers on the the vine. The 'demand' for 3D or >1080p is a figment of Hollywood's imagination.
Does anyone really like 3D, particularly in the home environment? One or maybe two 3D movies per half-decade is OK, but I don't hear (or see in line at the theater) any great demand for 3D other than among Hollywood marketing execs.
sPh
where the demands of their gimmick (3-D) drives the development other new gimmicks (higher res) ignoring entirely the demands of the people who actually buy things (such as, well, nothing more than a plain 2-D tv).
I have a suspicion 25:9 will take over before 2160p. Not enough of a change and bigger screen heights cause all kinds of issues like the need to rent a truck to bring your TV home. Wider screen gives options on how to arrange content to make it more interactive, as well as giving a wider field of view without resorting to the 3d gimmic.
Computer monitors have been following television resolutions & aspect ratios. We need height back in our displays for all the portrait document-oriented stuff that we spend the majority of our times with on computers (emails, webpages, word processing, heck even board-based casual games). I'm sick of seeing my interactive options through a narrow slit.
hear me out..
many of us have HTPC's. we store our media on hard disk.
how much space does blue ray take, natively? a shitload, that's how much. many more times what a dvd takes in its native form; and many people take dvd and compress THAT further before storing on htpc.
add in HD audio (which is beyond what consumer DACs and preamp stages can do; so this is clearly overkill for playback systems at home) and you end up with huge file sizes.
I actually do think this was on purpose. and now that disks are getting bigger, still (of course they are) the entertainment cartels want to keep the storage requirements absurdly high to 'convince' us to use the native shinydisc stuff, which is chock full of DRM. and commercials. gotta LOVE that 'do not skip' stuff, too.
I'm actually ok with upres'd dvd's on my TV. and I like how they don't chew up nearly as much space; plus the drm on dvd is trivial to break. drm on hd discs is a bit harder and much more hassle to deal with.
think about it. making the files so large (and taking up more room than they really need to; lets be honest) is actually a DOS. denial of service; by taking so much room on your system, it denies you the ability to store a large library, in practical terms.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Most of the call for 3D content are from the people PUSHING 3D as the "next big thing".
Actual traction in the customer channels is lukewarm AT BEST.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Call me a pessimist, but something tells me that trying to steam 4K quality movies over the kinds of broadband connections that most homes have right now is a BAD idea. Hell... even trying to stream movies in 720p without a ton of compression artifacts can be difficult in many areas right now.
Considering that the average connection right now is only 8 Mb/sec with a 100 GB download cap, you'll end up having to wait half an hour for a 4K resolution movie to buffer before it started. Not to mention that you would blow through your entire monthly bandwidth allotment before the movie was over.
The trickle down effect will ensure that we enter another craze were we're given our pixels back. I remember an age of 1200 vertical resolutions even on laptops (Dell D800 for business) that has become insurmountable with 'progress'. So the second these same guys who deflated our resolutions get down with setting some high posts, we'll be seeing our pixels back.
The bad part is that we'll reach an expanding - contracting sol-like state, because they got away with it once, and will do in the future. Meanwhile, it's a nice profit to make all of us (early-, late- and collector-type- adopters) throw money yearly at all these moving targets, specially with obsolete-by-design smartphones.
Hollywood should fix the real problem: How about content I actually want to watch at any resolution? Really, their current copy protection scheme of making movies I don't even want to copy is working great. But this may not be the best thing for their industry.
The cable and sat systems don't have that much bandwidth and they are still missing lot's of HD channels.
Now maybe if they where to dump all the old mpeg 2 sd and HD boxes and go all MEPG 4 they will have the room.
Few sources, even Blu-Ray, consistently deliver 1080p now. Get close enough to a display to see the pixels, and notice the compression blur that stabilizes once motion stops.
The next logical step is a higher frame rate. 24FPS for movies is way too slow. Cameron ("Titanic", "Avatar", etc.) has been bitching about this for years. He likes pans over highly detailed backgrounds, which produce strobing effects at 24FPS. Movies should be at least 48FPS, and maybe 72FPS. (The Showscan tests indicate that viewers notice improved quality up to about 72FPS, but not above that, so that's the limit of human perception.)
Personally, I'd like to see framefree compression. This is a concept out of Kerner Optical (a Lucasfilm spinoff). Instead of merely switching from one frame to the next, the player computes a morph between frames. This allows running at any display rate, allows arbitrarily slow motion, allows much higher compression ratios than MPEG-4, and requires substantial computation in the decoder. They never did much with the technology, though; it was sold to Monolith in Japan, which hasn't done much with it. It's worth looking at again, now that putting a GPU in a TV isn't a radical concept.
Last night, my son asked me "Dad, what will TV look like in 10 years?". I thought about all the great technological and social advancements that are going on. Then I thought back to how painfully long it took for digital TV and HTDV to get adopted, and how old-world media conglomerates are clinging to outdated business models. "Probably the same as today", I answered him.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
The original NTSC format matched the aspect ratio of movies at the time. Movie studios wanted to differentiate themselves from tv so they switched to a wide screen format. With HDTV tv's again switched to the aspect ratio of movies at the time. The movie studios then decided to switch to even wider screen format to compete with HDTV.
You all realize where this is going. If they keep coming out with new wider screen tv formats, with movie studios making even wider screen formats, eventually we will be watching TV so wide that it will be a million pixels wide but only one pixel high.
For HTPC use:
All my content is streamed from internet. Quality of stream is almost always lower than 1080p, so there is no need for higher resolution for TV watching both now and in foreseeable future.
I also noticed that when I sit right in front of the 46" TV-LCD panel, that serves for a nice and spacious desktop real estate. Only one aspect of this setup bothers me: for 46" of real estate the screen resolution is crap!
So yes, good thinking. Start making beyond-1080 screens at a reasonable price and I will snatch one right away. No TV functionality required, just an HDMI or DVI port.
More resolution on my TV to watch Movies? Whatever. I need resolution for my monitor though - 1080p is a joke in terms of desktop surface. Give me a standard 19" 4:3 LCD with same pixel resolution as the screen on iPhone 4. I'd easily pay1000$ for that.
A comparison: A normal 19" 1280x1024 LCD has ~90 DPI. If it had ~326 dpi instead like the iPhone4 claims, the display would have a resolution of ~4640x3710 - the closest "common resolution" would then be: 4096x3072 (HXGA) or 6400x4800 (HUXGA). *drool* Imagine all the lines of code that would fit on that.
Someone has a plan to auction off free over-the-air TV channel bandwidth to cell phone companies in exchange for billions needed to balance the budget. Isn't there some Federal obligation to provide access to those that don't want to pay for cable or is all bandwidth for sale? Grr.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
> The Economist writes a thoughtful article about the next generation of HDTVs and how they will provide resolutions beyond 1080p.
But... but... why?
> The drive for higher resolution is driven in part by the demands of 3D content.
But... but... but... WHY??
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The idea of big studios pushing for more and higher quality streaming content is just unrealistic. Even current rumors of Apple streaming 1080p at 10Mbps would put the bandwidth requirements at 4.39 GB per hour. Even that could get some households in trouble with the new standard 250GB caps that Comcast and Time Warner have been pushing. Take for example a family, where the kids watch 2 movies a week and the parents watch 1 per week. Assuming a movie length of 2 hours, that alone would be over 100GB for only 24 hours of content in a month. Even before anyone does anything else, or before all of the youtube videos and such, that's 40% of a typical cap in the US. Without fundamental change on the part of large US ISPs, the idea that streaming content will push us to new and exciting resolution territory is just unrealistic.
Instead of trying to find new and convoluted ways of selling us the same old rubbish over and over again, why don't they try to make some worthwhile content to show on the haunted goldfish tank?
I lived without one (in the UK) for 6 years in the late 90s. When I eventually got one again, the only improvement there had been was the increased nudity including bare breasts.
News, current affairs, documentaries and science programs had all declined severely. I fell like I'm being talked to like a 5-year-old child when I watch the news these days.
There is so much celebrity "news," gossip and lifestyle trash. It's dreadful.
At least you can get 30 minutes of bare breasts late at night for free on some channels with a bit of casual lesbianism thrown in for good measure.
Mind yourself!
And don't call me Shirley!!
I attended the NAB show in Las Vegas last year, and speaking with representatives of dozens of television manufacturers and content producers it was clear that 3D, even last April, was already a dead issue with no significant consumer uptake. The only people talking it up were the major studios. It's pretty clear the only group that benefits from 3D is theater operators, who charge higher prices for the showings. The major studios were pushing 3D to the home only to leverage their investment in producing the content. Nobody wants to wear the stupid glasses, and if you have a bunch of people over to watch a special event like the Superbowl, it's either impractical or downright impossible to accomodate everyone. Glasses-free 3D has a problem similar to 1st-gen LCD panels in that the viewing angle is extremely narrow. 3D is not driving the road to 4K and beyond. Military usage, as always is the big driver, as the NSA especially needs higher and higher resolution monitors for their analysis. The other off-shoot that is a big driver is cinema-width TV's. 1920x1080p is insufficient to view many of the CinemaScope and similar titles that were produced in their full glory, at a large enough size to make any difference from DVD resolution. Simply making 1080p sets larger only makes the pixels larger, and produces perceived graininess. They had a wonderful 200" Panasonic LCD television on display, but it was no where near as good as the 40" 4K set directly across from it. The bigger problem is that Joe Sixpack on average doesn't know the differences between 720p, 1080i and 1080p. DVD's look great on 720p sets, but BluRays do not. Even worse, Joe Sixpack doesn't know that there are different HD's at all! Joe Sixpack goes mostly on price, which is why the low-end sets are selling well, but the more expensive 55-70" 1080p 240/480Hz sets are not, and why the manufacturers are struggling right now. And why they're trying to change the focus to 4K sets. HDTV's have become a commodity, and they need to introduce something new to keep their sales momentum. Unfortunately, the consumers haven't been cooperating.
Nothing to see here but us trolls...move along...
We're gonna need more bandwidth at the service provider and at the home if we're gonna replace bluray with streaming...
1080p24 (24frames per second) is about 4-8Mb/s when streamed from something like youtube, however a bluray disk can stream at ~54Mb/s.
However, I could encode, or rather compress the hell out of a 1080p source and still call it 1080p. So I guess we come back to the definition of what is HD or 1080p...
The ONLY reason HDTV ever took off is because they turned off the standard signal and they stopped making the $50 old tvs.
Most people just want an inexpensive tv. To get people to move up they will either need to mandate the new technology or get it dirt cheap. DVD players only took off when they started costing less than a VCR and film companies figured out that you can make and then sell DVD's for real cheap.
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Don't people watch TV to escape reality?
As in entertainment?
So what's with increasing resolution even beyond 1080p?
Funnily enough, it's said in some movies, they actually digitally blurred an actresses forehead.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Much of h264's compression is done using this method. It does require substantial computation to decode-GPU computation like dxva is often required for smooth 1080p playback.
New consumer technology is never aimed at the Joe Sixpack of the time it is released, its an upgrade for Jane Enthusiast.
Joe Sixpack is usually several iterations behind in terms of what they own, and often a couple more in terms of what they are making effective use of.
With a proposed new technology, "Joe Sixpack isn't making effective use of what we have now" isn't really a meaningful criticism. Its almost always true in almost every domain, and it never is more than distantly related to the reason new technologies succeed or fail. Nevertheless, its pretty much guaranteed to be the most common criticism on Slashdot of any new technology.
It has been having 1280*1024 or more pixels since, what, 10 years already?
We are in the Idiocracy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
We will be able to watch "Ow My Balls" on the same large screen that Frito used.... http://www.nerdnexus.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/idiocracy-tv-dvd1.jpg
In one corner, you have the studios who want 1080p content pumped out, in the most rigorous DRM fashion possible, to the unrealized monetary assets, errr customers, for an outrageously high premium. The studios who want to charge ANY content provider streaming the studio's material to pay through the nose for the right of distribution.
On the other hand, you have the telco's who want to monetize every bit on the internet, and are soon going to charge ANY content provider streaming the studio's material to pay through the nose for the right of distribution of material through the telco's internet.
Who loses in this battle? The end user, and the netflixs of the world can not maintain the same business model because they will simply end up as a set of finger cuffs as both parties give them the screw job.
Looks like I'll be buying ALL of my content in the bargain bin, and reading a crap ton of e-books.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Actual traction in the customer channels is lukewarm AT BEST.
If by lukewarm you mean that most people don't give a flying fuck, you would be correct.
A lot of people only recently upgraded to a HDTV, and most of those aren't going to be looking for a replacement any time soon. It's the industry just pushing their latest new technology onto the consumer market because they realize that nearly everyone has gone through the upgrade cycle and their increase in revenue is going to dissipate.
I personally don't even own a single Bluray title, and I don't plant to in the near future. I only bought the HDTV because my old CRT finally croaked and the price was about right. I don't even get the appeal in 3D. The few times I've seen it was in the local theatre and it was always gimmicky and didn't contribute much to the movie itself. With HD content under the right conditions you notice the increase in resolution, but even then you don't really miss it if it's not there.
I guess the industry is really just hoping to keep riding the revenue wave, but I think they're in for a cold shower.
I don't plant to
Oh for crying out loud ;_;
1. HDTV has a path to 2160p, and uHDTV projects to 4320p, or 7680x4320. In tests, it only takes 4TB to record 20 minutes of this. We will be a while getting this on the market, since even buffering this is going to present new challenges, and the bandwidth just doesn't exist. Thank NHK and the BBC for this advance...
2. Quad HDTV (uHDTV) would require either reducing pixel size by 4x, or mandating minimum screen sizes a lot larger than what we have now. Two ways to do this; Learn to make Apple's retina displays on a huge scale, or, more likely, flexible screens. I can deal with assembling a frame and basically rolling out the screen into the frame. This is cool beyond all this, and will probably happen. Shipping 72" screens must be fraught with uncertainty, but a tube for a rollup screen would be much less trouble.
Unfortunately, this is all conjecture. Much technology to be made, and of course the raw data is just overwhelming now. Do I want a 256TB array in the house to save a few movies on, and do I get this on anything other than fiber?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We need HD quality video formats like a lot of the streaming video formats that can vary their frame rate to as high as 120 or even 240 Hz for action.
How about improving the frame rate, for a change?
The ONLY reason HDTV ever took off is because they turned off the standard signal and they stopped making the $50 old tvs.
Digital TV doesn't mean HD TV. I'm also pretty sure they were sending out coupons for converters.
The computer monitor mentioned in the article is the IBM T221. There are a couple versions, either 41 or 48 HZ max @ 3840 x 2400 using 4 DVI cables. They can be bought for about $900-$1100 used on eBay depending on the seller (yes I do sell some, but I'm posting as AC), but require certain video cards, etc. to run properly.
Disregarding the cap, I personally have a 7Mb/sec connection and can watch 720p videos (youtube, etc) with only about a 3 second buffer at the start. The video then loads at LEAST 15-25% faster than playback. Doubt 1080p would do very well though...
The caps are only for "external" content. Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are salivating at the thought of selling you 4K-sized movies (with no cap implications) at a very high premium.
This is what the telco/cable and media industries want: to turn the Internet back into cable TV.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I was laughing at people a few years ago "oh man I gotta get rid of this perfectly fine TV for a 640p model, OMFG theres a 720P model time to spend another 3 grans, HOLY FUCK! 1080 P!!!!!! time to get that new one, hey osgeld why havent you upgraded yet?"
cause in a few years there will be a 204080 Z model and I will be able to buy your 4 grand hunk of shit for 100 bucks
I am not that far away now and my 27 inch sanyo crt is still working fine
...and now a 22" HDTV costs $119, just like the old 19" $119 tvs cost. Unless you're one of the 10,000 people in the US who still take advantage of OTA TV, in which case you'll need a $150 converter box with HDMI out.
moox. for a new generation.
1080 isn't a number picked out of the air. This is the number of scan lines a typical eye can resolve at a viewing distance of 3 picture heights from the screen. You won't be able to see any more detail, and many people can barely perceive the resolution increase of 1080 line HD over 480 line SD (although the higher-quality digital video image and 16:9 aspect ratio is perceivable to most people).
Unless video screens become much larger (like taking up your whole wall), most people are not going to be sitting closer than 3 picture heights to a video screen.
Now I 100% can imagine a whole wall screen of "OLED wallpaper", but until that is practical, UHDTV will not have much utility.
What will have utility is non-glasses-based 3D displays (aka autostereoscopic). These could use UHDTV 2D panels to generate multiple views projected through the room with lenses or through a parallax barrier.
We are still in a recession where many of us are deep in debt to our eyeballs.
The 3D thing is stupid and very very old technology that can be done in software or just giving a signal with the blues and reds in different spots that look awesomingly cool with 3d glasses. I had a pair back in the 1980s. This reminds me of the stupid monster HDMI cables that sell for $100 at Bestbuy. Thankfully another slashdotter informed me where I can get ones for $10 at BigLots so I can finally upgrade ... which was in itself a waste of time and money.
All of this is is greed and the hopes that consumers will just keep buying and buying and upgrading. First it was DVD, then HDTV, then DVI, now HDMI, then blueray, and now 3d and soon 2040P (made that up) with 3D zoom technology etc. When is good enough? I wouldn't mind if this shows actual improvements but it won't and this reminds of an article on slasdhot yesterday that compares speakers today from 30 years ago. What the electronics and MPAA fail to realize is many of us wont be upgrading as the costs are outrageous and the improvements are too few if any. The focus on shiny and big bass has degraded quality on newer items as the article yesterday on slashdot shows with speakers. All this is overpriced and overmargined electronics patented to the godzoo hoping Joe Six pack quickly opens his credit card for the latest in yesterday's technology with 3D now in hardware lol. ... oh with gold plated HDMI cables and ethernet cables for his IE 7 experience.
http://saveie6.com/
The only things I'm looking for in an HDTV in the next 10 years are, a) thinner/lighter, b) larger, c) cheaper, and d) cool/firmware upgradeable stuff like iTunes/Netflix/Pandora, whatever included. If they can make a 1" thick 100+" tv for what we now pay for 42" ones, I'm all in.
I'd like to see cable TV companies do something more akin to video-on-demand to the television set
That's called switched video, and it's commonly used for less popular channels. CableCARD users have been heard to complain that they can't receive switched channels. But any channel popular enough to be included in the "digital starter" package won't be switched.
To me, the biggest draw of an HDTV was just the ability to plug a media center PC into the VGA port.
Once you stop broadcasting and start unicasting, it would be absurd to send an 8 megapixel video stream to a cellphone for viewing. But somebody with a nice projection system (a few years down the road) might well be willing to pay extra for it.
Now here's a mindbender: A modern smartphone's video processor is fast enough to connect to "a nice projection system" with an HDMI cable. Does the video player app see "cellphone" or "nice projection system"?
Worse than 1080p resolution limitations is the whole 16:9 craze in monitors.... what a useless ratio for work.
I must respectfully disagree. Windows 7 and Ubuntu Unity have Snap, which makes 1920x1080 feel like having two 960x1080 pixel monitors. Even Windows XP has its own split (click taskbar entry, Ctrl+right click another, Tile Vertically). This way you can keep your web application code editor and your testing browser side-by-side, or your code editor and your library reference, etc.
many of us have HTPC's.
I'd love to see evidence that you're right, but it appears other Slashdot users disagree with you. HTPCs are a niche so small that PC games aren't even targeted to them. Other Slashdot users have told me this: "Most non-geek people simply have no desire to hook up their computer to their TV."
Not for nothing, but they don't even stream 1080p content which is twice the resolution of DVD's so why should higher resolutions be the killer feature needed for online streaming?
The problem with video streaming is that the Internet infrastructure cannot take this amount of bandwidth saturation. Netflix is already one of the highest consumers of network bandwidth in North America, and it has to reduce resolution and quality in order to make it serviceable. Also all major ISP's have bandwidth caps and throttling, and the supposedly competitive ISP's are hindered by the big telco's limiting their bandwidth access.
The bottom line is that online video streaming is being crippled by traditional content providers such as cable and satellite TV, who are no more interested in going beyond HDTV( they do not currently serve 1080p content either) then the consumer who thinks they are watching Full HDTV on their $300 WalMart flat panel.
Steaming can barely handle standard definition. How the hell do they expect it to handle beyond HD?
Every LCD TV seems to have a a ATSC tuner in it. no need for the converter box at all, just hook up a UHF antenna and away you go.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
"Actual traction in the customer channels is lukewarm AT BEST."
You've never been in a porn shop, have you?
3D porn flying off the fucking shelves all day long. Spoofs of Avatar, Ghostbusters, Batman, etc are done in 3d and they're selling like mad.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I am still happy with my old 13-inch analog TV and do not feel any desire to upgrade to HDTV or anything beyond HDTV. Back in the 1980s, I was satisfied with an even smaller 10-inch back and white TV set.
I do not understand why I should care about watching TV at the maximum resolution possible. I enjoy watching an occasional movie or television program just fine at a lower resolution. I also enjoy watching TV on a small screen about as much as on a larger screen.
The only place where I care about resolution is on my computer monitor. In that case, a higher resolution allows more information to be shown on the screen. But, as a far-sighted middle aged person who wears reading glasses to see a too close computer monitor, the currently available resolutions are all that I can handle.
I only watch a few hours of television per week. I do not have cable or satellite, and the mountain top translator for this part of Arizona was not required to make the digital transition. So, I am still watching TV with my old mid-1990s era 13-inch analog TV set without a converter box. When the evening news is on, I frequently just listen on a radio that has an analog channels 2-13 TV band. I usually just listen to the news while doing some other task, without having a screen to look at.
I think they should make everything 60fps by default. That's what i "demand".
I do digital design for a living and spend my money shot time looking a waveform traces. The wider the screen the better. It's also nice to be able to put a full page of a spec next to the RTL I'm writing.
Our eyes have much higher single viewing capacity than most require. Video overloads us with information so we can't distinguish the difference even with much lower resolution.
Just looking at this image and move back until it stops moving, this gives you the optimal range we can see to.
My vote would be for the smartphone to be smart enough to determine the capacity of its bandwidth
Most connections that I've seen have a peak rate far faster than the sustained rate, and a device cannot sustain a peak rate transfer for two hours per night. How would a program determine the daily or monthly transfer cap of its available Internet connections? I've never seen any sort of protocol for devices to query upstream routers for quota statistics.
you start needing to make 1 pixel 1.125 pixels, and that is hard to do.
Again, how? Interpolation from the 704x480 pixels of DVD's clean area to the width of your display makes each output pixel a weighted sum of input pixels. This is a few muls and a few adds per pixel, no more complicated than the interpolation that ASP and AVC decoders already need to perform for quarter-pixel motion compensation.
Both 24fps and 48fps convert badly into 60Hz with stuttering, and have horrendeous 4% speedup on 50Hz (most of the world). The more important factor is having movies run correctly on broadcast television without stuttering or speedup.
Modern displays are digital. They take an input, which is an NxM grid, and display it on a grid of rectangular pixels.
And if this grid is larger than the original grid at which the source was sampled, the display process takes a weighted sum of the input at adjacent pixels and uses that to create a smoothly varying (that is, blurred) output signal. These weighted sums can have 2 (bilinear) or 4 (bicubic) taps, as an approximation of the ideal sinc-weighted sum that has unbounded taps. On a decent TV, they are not nearest neighbor as your "top 7 rows will all be dark" example three posts up suggests.
The source material for a display is not something that has 'a resolution down to individual photons', it is the recording of a CCD
So the ultimate source is "the live source", which can be re-created with a re-shoot. And for home viewing, the immediate source isn't even the CCD; it's the CCD, then post-production effects, then a lossy video encoding process. (I was waiting for you to say "CCD" because I didn't want to derail it into a CCD vs. CMOS debate.)
If you want to think in terms of Nyquist, then think of sampling a waveform at one rate and then trying to recreate it with a fixed-rate generator of another rate.
This is an interpolation process that introduces blurring, but my point is that the blurring is less objectionable to the human visual system than the "top 7 rows will all be dark" algorithm that you suggested earlier. It's ideally indistinguishable from imperfect focus in front of the CCD.
As soon as the content owners figure out how to be the cable companies the caps will fly off... but of course you'll be locked down so hard you'll only be able to conveniently consume their content.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This has already been discussed.... cc cnet see last two comments. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20025250-1.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody
How upgrading the cameras before worrying about higher resolution displays? BBC still shoot in 720p for some things.
until they start broadcasting in 1080p, people won't getting the most out of what they have, so why, besides the manufacturers' greed, would they need to do this? sure, there are blu-rays and video games at 1080p, but how many cable/netlix/satellite/etc boxes are even doing 1080p right now?
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Why would I see the benefits today?
1920x1080p, or its 4:3 aspect ratio cousin, 1920x1440, wasn't anything spectacular in 2001 on a 21 inch CRT monitor, so why are we all buying into the craze of 1080p? Content.
As soon as we start to see content on 4320p available, we will buy it, 3D tv is a flash in the pan idea and really screws us all over in the end, but 7680x4320 will be a content-driven format, and whatever format we see that content on will be trivial..
I personally would love to see a return of 12" (12 inch) Laserdisc systems as a home enthusiasts technology, but this time with the modern technology that we have today of Blu-Ray and Holographic storage.
Not only would this completely obliterate Piracy rings for a short time (Until we invent stream-capturing devices) but it would also provide a stable and future-proof (for at least the next 20 years, or more) ground for the new higher resolution contents, then maybe we can see a convergence of areal-density on 12" Laserdisc catch up and beat the storage requirements of 7680x4320 content, and even beyond this for years to come.
But no one will do it, no one will build it, why? BECAUSE they all just want us to buy again, and again, and again, and again, and fleece us all out of money, again, and again.
I never got into DVD, I never got into Blu-Ray, why? Because I'm happy with Laserdisc, and I have quite possibly the largest content database in the world available to me, stretching back to the start of stamping out Laserdiscs, in 1979.
You know what has won the storage format wars? Laserdisc, because I don't have to sit there and watch anti-piracy advertisments, you guys do, I'm free to sell, trade, copy, or buy my Laserdiscs from anyone I want, and most of the great movies on Laserdisc were manufactured /the year after the movie was released in theaters/, which means that I have a copy of Blade Runner made in 1983!!, Its 30 years old and it plays PERFECTLY!, without any of the digital editing that Directors or DVD Producers have added to the movie, and I have Cigarette Burns on my copy of Blade Runner, indicating when to change reels.
All honesty, movies were meant to be delivered in their native aspect ratio, but computers reached perfection in detailing information to the user at the 4:3 aspect ratio, and we need to see a divergence in the LCD screen marketplace to cater for both the movie lover and the computer user, THAT would truly drive sales up for new panels.