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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.
http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html
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."
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.
And the misconceptions shown in that chart is exactly why we cant have nicer resolutions. That chart details the normal resolving capability of the human eye (one arcminute). The lines he drew there indicate when a person with 20/20 vision would be able to fully resolve each pixel. It does not account that a significant amount of the population can naturally see better than that, nor does it account for the fact that another significant amount of the population wears corrective lenses to see better than that. It does not account for the fact that certain structures like two parallel high contrast lines can be resolved significantly smaller than that. It does not account for the fact that structures smaller than that can still produce visible aliasing artifacts.
Basically, someone somewhere took a couple minutes to find out the meaning of "20/20 vision" and decided that's all the better we ever need, without realizing that the human eye is far more complex than that single value depicts.
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 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