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Sources Say ITU Has Approved Ultra-High Definition TV Standard
Qedward writes with this excerpt from Techworld: "A new television format that has 16 times the resolution of current High Definition TV has been approved by an international standards body, Japanese sources said earlier today. UHDTV, or Ultra High Definition Television, allows for programming and broadcasts at resolutions of up to 7680 by 4320, along with frame refresh rates of up to 120Hz, double that of most current HDTV broadcasts. The format also calls for a broader palette of colours that can be displayed on screen. The video format was approved earlier this month by member nations of the International Telecommunication Union, a standards and regulatory body agency of the United Nations, according to an official at NHK, Japan's public broadcasting station, and another at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Both spoke on condition of anonymity."
Same old shit in high resolution! =D
I am going to wait for CSUHDTV
Crazy Super Ultra High Definition TV.
We have Bluray that can pump out 40 Mbps and a new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard coming that support 4K/60Hz video at around 40 Mbps
We also have a few 4K displays just starting to appear.
And now a UHDTV 4K video standard (as well as 8K).
So looking good for the new gen with broadcast, storage, encoding and display standards all sorted out .. bring it on !!!
The crabs on porn stars will look like invading sci-fi monsters.
This is actually much more than 2x standard broadcasts in terms of resolution as far as the US market is concerned. In the US almost everything "HD" is 720 @ 60fps (or sometimes even 30!). This is 8k, which is 16x the resolution of 1080, and twice the frame rate.
A new international television standard. How long until we in the US invent our own entirely incompatible system just so it can depend on patents owned by American companies?
ATSC versus DVB-T, CDMA2000/EvDO vs. GSM/UMTS, etc.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I don't agree. As long as you have sufficient vertical resolution (1080 isn't enough, 1200 is ok, 1440 is great for me at the moment), then horizontal resolution is fine at either 16:9 or 16:10. In fact, at (say) 1200 vertical, 16:9 would give you a more useful monitor (won't ever exist, of course).
1920x1080 is, of course, an abomination for work and I think this is where the hatred of 16:9 comes from. Whereas 2560x1440 looks great from where I'm sitting.
Maybe cable companies might finally get FULL HD content to display on our Ultra HD TV's.
Another reason why cable companies need to be destroyed, because they don't even know how to provide state of the art, but feel inclined to comment on what the new standards should be.
About the only thing UltraHD is going to introduce is a new optical disk format because broadband and content providers are incapable of creating and delivering UltraHD content without massive compression and inferior audio.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
We have a couple of 720p (not 1080p, 720p) TVs in our house, a 32" LCD, and a 50" plasma (hey, 720p plasma's cheap.)
How decent is 720p? Well, both TVs appear to be about the same quality as, or often a little higher than, watching a friggin' movie at the cinema, if the source is decent and relatively free of artifacts.
I think, for the most part, we're talking diminishing returns at this point adding pixels. So I'm a little baffled by this announcement. Is it real? Is there a serious market for TV for people with super exceptional eyesight? Is video compression technology really going to improve so much over the next ten years that this'll be worth using - especially over the Internet, which, let's be honest, is where everything's going at the moment.
I'm glad to see innovation, but I'm just finding it hard to believe that this improvement is significantly useful: arguably, like Blu-ray, it might actually hold back HD, rather than help it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The fact that real work is done with lots of text, and text goes from top to bottom far more frequently then scales off endlessly to the right?
We have these stupidly huge 16:9 monitors today that can't even display one page of a PDF without scrolling and yet 2/3 of the screen is sitting empty. It's a terrible aspect ratio for computers.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm sure it's very nice, but these types of things are simply diverting time and resources away from what the true goal should be: sexbots. Anime themed sexbots, porn star themed sexbots, weird fetish sexbots -- sexbots.
Japan, why have you gone astray?
What makes a 4:3 ratio so much better than a 16:9 ratio for your monitor?
I think that 16:10 is nice, through something in between 4:3 and 16:10 would be ideal. Much of the work I do involves source documents and a working document. Since most of those are formatted for the 8.5" x 11" written page, a 16:10.3 monitor is the right size to hold two. Given some additional space for menus, a taskbar, etc., I think that the idea ratio is about 16:10.5.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
you may have a point.
most people, myself included, complain because 1080 vertical lines of resolution is a regression from where we were headed in the mid-2000s. all of a sudden, circa 2009 or 2010, 1080 vertical lines of resolution was the maximum you could get, no matter what monitor size you purchased, unless you were willing to spend over $1000 on a monitor. It's like every panel manufactuer in existance decided to just quit. all of them were constantly increasing pixel density every few years and then they all quit. just... gave up. either that or moved to smartphones.
This new standard, while laughably high, at least gives me hope that pretty soon pixel densities on standard computer monitors might start going up again. 16x9 ratio monitors might indeed be "ok" if we had double the vertical resolution we have now.
Not useless for everyone, just you.
Even so - there are monitors that pivot from portrait to landscape. 16x9 is great for office work if you rotate it 90 degrees.
I dont see the point, yet
People buying the TVs subsidizing the economy of scale lowering the price of equally resolant computer monitors. And incidentally releasing us from the purgatory of 1920x1080 low dpi crap that is spun as high-end by CE marketing departments everywhere.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Real life is crisper because of the dynamic range of the intensities of light. All the technical details of photography---ISO range, aperture, neutral density filter, etc.---are just clever ways to clamp down the dynamic range to get a reasonable approximation of real life. Even high dynamic range (HDR) photography is an approximation. It still has to be presented through a low dynamic range display. It just means HDR is using a different clamping function.
Consider that there are also people who are tetrachromatic who can see a color between red and green. Surely all computer and TV displays, being RGB, are always lacking a color for them. Imagine seeing the world through a broken display where one of the colors isn't working.
I once had a signature.
I think the GP is referring to the fact that once we had a high resolution TV spec, pretty much all panel manufactuers decided that "what's good for TVs is good for computers" and no longer make any higher resolution than 1920x1080 unless you're willing to spend close to $1000 or more.
I see no reason to expect they'll do otherwise in the future, so any future TV resolution spec has immediate implications on future computer monitor resolutions.
What you're talking about is little to do with resolution so much as colour gamut, accurate reproduction and (yes) true 3D.
Also your eye is pretty bad unless it's looking directly as something. Then that thing comes into focus because you focus on it. That can't happen with a screen showing already-chosen focus on something else. So no matter how you squint, your eyes can't get the background trees into focus when they pass over them (and thus it's not "real") - and they probably pass over them several times a second while you're watching content that you've never seen before.
What you're saying is that watching a flat box showing colour reproductions of pre-recorded 2D imagery isn't like "real-life". And it isn't. Because even the best colour elements in a TV can't replicate real-life (and some people can even perceive UV and not know it!), even the best 3D TV can't provide depth to the image sufficiently, even the best camera doesn't record everything in "focus-free" format so that you *CAN* focus on any part of the image you like, etc. etc. etc. In the same way that Stereo, 5.1, 7.2, or anything else you choose cannot accurately reproduce an arbitrary sound in an arbitrary location around your head.
The room for improvement is not in resolution. You honestly *cannot* resolve it at a decent distance with a pure datastream (companies badly compressing video? That's another issue entirely). Even though you *can* see the light of a candle in complete darkness from MILES away, you're not measuring the same things.
The best room for improvement would probably be proper "free-focus" imagery. Where you can put up an image and I can see EVERY pixel in pin-sharp detail whether it was one mile away from the camera or one inch (and not have to refocus my eyes, or to fool them sufficiently that they AUTOMATICALLY refocus themselves). Because that pixel element behind the actor's shoulder ISN'T REALLY six foot behind the one that represents his shoulder when it's displayed, so it will not look "real".
Until you have proper, full, 3D and such free-focus media, you won't get what you want. And we know how well 3D has gone down - just as well as it does every time it's "reinvented" for another generation.
The BBC and NHK collaborated to demonstrate this system during the olympics , broadcasting to 3 sites in UK , 2 in US and 2 in Japan.
Further detail See http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2012/08/the-olympics-in-super-hi-visio.shtml
The opening/closing ceremony were broadcast live whereas during the rest of the week a daily hour long highlights package covering the opening ceremony and specific events package was compiled and broadcast on a daily basis.
I was fortunate enough to experience the system at Bradford Museum of the Moving Image on a 15 metre square screen and a couple of megawatts of sound..
With reputedly only 3 cameras in the world camera angles were somewhat limited, the opening ceremony coverage placed you in the heart of the stadium as if you were an audience member showing off the wide field of vision offered. I found the 22 channels of sound to be somewhat overwhelming in volume which I judged to be a bit of a cheap trick to impress. As with initial experience of Hidef the enhanced resolution can lead one to examine detail towards the edge of the field of vision. I was slightly disappointed that there was some blockiness at the edge. This may be due to focussing issues, focus is performed away from the camera.
All in all I found it quite comparable to the Imax experience excepting lack of 3d.
16:9 is great for having windows side by side. And as someone else pointed out, if you prefer to see lots of text at once, why not get a HD display and rotate it 90 degrees? Then you basically have two and a half 1024x768 displays piled on top of each other. Basically a desktop publishing type setup.
which is totally what she said
I do real work with text, and a lot of it. I've written an unwholy amount of home assignments, translated about 15 books, maybe more, and I find 16:10 to be a very nice ratio for having two documents (source and output) side by side at all times. I've tried working with 4:3 and it's not really comfortable, so I've had to delegate the 22 inch CRT to secondary screen status.
They still make 4:3 (actually 5:4) monitors. It just costs more at the same display size.
Worse than that it costs more for less pixels of width and the same/less pixels of height to get the traditional aspect ratio monitor.
looking at a computer parts supplier I use frequently
1024x768: not for sale except on very expensive touchscreens.
1366x768: £61.39
1280x1024: £78.76
1920x1080: £64.28
1600x1200: £541.80
1920x1200: £203.28
This is why so many of us end up with 1920x1080 screens, it's not the nicest aspect ratio but it's FAR lower on a price per pixel scale than anything else.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Now throw out those old TVs in crappy old 3D HD and buy NEW TVs in UltraHD!! And now that cable companies have started giving out HD programming for free, rather than charge extra they get the option to charge for UltraHD content instead. Great for everyone!
Oh, and if you sit at home and look at your TV screen with a microscope, I guess you can see a little more detail now.
I don't think we want light-field television (non-polarized light picture allowing you to focus on foreground or background) any more than we want 360 degree panoramic TV (except maybe for live events). The director chooses what's in the frame and what's in-focus and it's a storytelling tool. I'd like a higher color gamut and greater dynamic range, though.
Once upon a time (ca. 1989-1990), they did. NCD (Network Computing Devices) made a series of X Terminals based on both the 68000 and some of the early MIPS CPUs. One model (the NCD16) featured a 16" square monochrome CRT, at 1024x1024 resolution, and a 1:1 aspect ratio. The Computer History Museum also has an NCD16 in its collection.
Certainly is work in that direction ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding ... That gets you a 50% reduction in bit rates over MPEG-4/AVC - which in turn is 50% reduction over MPEG-2 used in many most digital TV standards
So that's a 2-4x increase in efficiency + modulation improvements that are bound to happen = plenty of scope for 4K digital TV
8K is a bit more a stretch at the moment
The fact that real work is done with lots of text, and text goes from top to bottom far more frequently then scales off endlessly to the right?
When you get to a vaguely reasonable size of screen, text *doesn't* generally just go from top to bottom - it is usually arranged into many blocks, such as overlapping windows. Reading lines of text that stretch all the way from one side of a 21" monitor to the other is *hard*, even on a 4:3 screen, and this is exactly why broadsheet newspapers arrange text into columns.
Personally, for most of my work I find large wide screen monitors are nicer to work with than large 4:3 monitors.
With a widescreen monitor, you can also get 2 A4 pages side by side, but if you need to deal with strict top-to-bottom text then you can always rotate it to portrait orientation, in which case high aspect ratio screens are certainly much better than the old square ones.
We have these stupidly huge 16:9 monitors today that can't even display one page of a PDF without scrolling and yet 2/3 of the screen is sitting empty. It's a terrible aspect ratio for computers.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
TV?
...
Isn't that what old people used to watch CBS on before hulu/netflix/amazon/youtube/bittorrent/hbo to go/showtime anytime/Oprah24
By the time this standard is implemented, we'll all be streaming video directly into our eyeballs from our iPhone Vs while riding around in our self-driving google cars. Who cares what format the data is in when you're just going to slap it in one of a dozen windows and project it on the back of the seat in front of you?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ever since TV and computer displays became essentially the same thing, the consumer market has dominated.
Recall, if you will, all the build-up to the "Grand Alliance" that gave us today's ATSC (HDTV) standard. There was politicing on Analog vs. Digital (kind of a no-brainer), on RF modulation (we lost out on that one, here, 8VSB was selected due to Qualcomm lobbying and the fact it interfered less with existing NTSC broadcasts... now that those broadcasts are gone, we still have the problem that the signal isn't worth a damn indoors). And on display resolution.
Hollywood, Inc. wanted a 2:1 aspect ration. The computer industry, savvy enough to understand the impact of millions of consumer displays at higher-than-existing PC resolutions, wanted something more boxy. 16:9 was the compromise widescreen aspect ratio.
The PC industry, naturally, went full steam ahead... at 16:10. Silly PC industry. This lasted for awhile, but ultimately, with all those consumer LCD panels out there, most cried "Uncle" and went 16:9. I have dual 1920x1200 16:10 monitors at home, though I see an upgrade to 2560x1440 in the very near future. At work, they've been 16:9 (dual) for my current and previous job. Hardly useless for real work (and that's more Electronics CAD than video these days, though I did EE-CAD, embedded software, web servers, photography, and video at my last job), and the difference is, if anything, more significant for video work (16:9 monitors don't leave any room for controls on the full-screen video panel, 'cept as an overlay) than "real" work like designing circuitry.
-Dave Haynie
This is also ignoring just how cheap those 16:9 screens are, compared with what you paid for a 4:3 CRT 15 years ago. They are able to be so cheap partly due to cheaper components, but also due to volume. If a monitor can work as both a TV and a computer display, that greatly expands its possible market, which means the manufacturer can sell more and defray more startup costs per unit. That translates into a lower price at the point of sale.
This is also why resolutions of more than 1080 lines cost more: there is simply a smaller market for them, and the fixed startup costs have to be paid over fewer units sold, otherwise no one could afford to make them.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I have a monitor that does that (NEC MultiSync E222W). Got it specifically because I wanted to try pivoting it as you suggested. The problem I have when I rotate it is the viewing angle and non-uniform brightness. Without boosting its height even more than it already is (7" or so off my desk) and making it much more uneven from my laptop screen, I don't see how I can fix it. And my laptop is already elevated the same amount, so not much chance of getting even higher there.
Ignoring the non-uniform brightness and viewing angle issues, it's substantially more mouse movement with a screen pivoted. Yes, I suppose I can install some 3rd party software, but most of my work is spent remoting into servers and I can't set them up so they only work well in my environment.
tl;dr: Pivoted monitors sounds like a great idea, but not suitable for my usage pattern.
Windows 8's "new style" apps don't. So it's easy to imagine Microsoft deciding for us desktop users that programs on a 7680x4320 panel should also be full screen, just to make sure we don't get confused about the difference between that view and that of a 3.5", 800x600 smartphone screen. That'll be Windows 9 that phases out the "classic" windowed Windows. And Windows 10 that's sold, fire-sale style, to Oracle or IBM or someone looking to get into the OS business, as Microsoft goes down in flames. Or not... but it sure would feel good.
-Dave Haynie
I think that leaves out the Niquist sampling theorem and the dynamic environment.
Even assuming the eye is a non-moving digital receiver, for the TV to exceed the eye's spatial frequency it has to provide 2X the spatial resolution in each direction.
But also, as was shown in the first 3D head-up display work at NASA Ames in the early 1990s, the eye's natural dithering combined with retinal and brain processing provides a virtual resolution that can be much higher - several times higher - than simple static pixels. Which is partly why 'nature' looks better. In the NASA experiment a pair of 128x128 pixel displays were built into a helmet that also had eye tracking. When the eye tracking and display were running at high enough resolutions (60 Hz+), the dithering of the eyes was picked up by the eye tracker and the 3D scene could be synthesized to match the new perspective. As a result a virtual resolution an order of magnitude greater was perceived than the rough 128 pixels.
The eye is constantly moving very slight amounts so that an edge between colors (for example) may be picked up by different cells (vertically and horizontally). Since cells are not aligned in vertical rows, this provides a virtual edge line that our brain extrapolates into our perception based on this constantly shifting view, resulting in perhaps (nobody knows AFAIK) five to ten times the apparent static resolution. It's the eye+brain's equivalent of subpixel rendering - call it subpixel perceiving.
Also the retinal cells are constantly switching on and off (firing and resting), shifting the view between adjacent retinal cells- anyone who has taken LSD has been aware of that as they see the 'squirming' of the image as it's picked up by different cells. Normally our brain filters that out but LSD turns off the filters, apparently.
So, bottom line, the Lechner Distance is not the final word. It assumes a static environment that does not exist, and ignores temporal characteristics in retina and brain processing of the image.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I think it depends greatly on usage. As we move more toward internet-based watching, resolution becomes more important - text requires better resolution than images of ripples on water, for example. It also depends on which viewers. Let's stipulate that the 'average' football fan doesn't really care whether the edges of the numbers on a jersey are crisp, as two 300 pound behemoths crash into each other at a combined speed of 30 miles per hour. But another viewer might very much like to see the details on the wings of a butterfly and be able to distinguish the species of flowers the butterfly is flying over, while also being able to see the entire broad view of the field. This is the reason why IMAX is better than normal movies - you get the detail _and_ you get the view that extends past your momentary field of vision, so you can and must move your head from side to side to take it all in.
I remember seeing (I think it was "Space Station 3D", at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC), which included clips from normal movie cameras of some of the earlier launches of the rocket. They looked like home movies compared to the IMAX segments - the rocket was grainy, and the entire shot only took up the center of the IMAX screen. I believe that IMAX had over 9 times as many pixels per area of the screen as the Cinema quality segments, and extended three times as far across the room.
I had the good fortune to see some extremely high quality prints produced by an award-winning nature photographer (I forget his name, unfortunately). His prints, typically about 3 feet by 4 feet, are printed at 1000 dpi (each image is several hundred megabytes). The original photos are taken with the highest resolution film available, on 8x10 view camera (like Ansel Adams), then digitally processed by the photographer with the best equipment, to get the utmost dynamic range and pixel resolution. The detail is amazing. You can look at a forest scene, then get very close, and on the farthest trees in the picture, if you look very, very close, you can see individual leaves or pine needles, at or beyond the limit of your eye. As a result, the picture looks like the real thing, not like a picture. (of course, it's not 3D).
I want both the width of screen that allows me to be embedded in the scene, and resolution sufficient that if I put my head a foot from the screen, I still can't distinguish individual pixels. Anything less is a compromise to short term technical constraints that should not drive our standards.
I see no reason to take these assessments that 'most people can't see any better than X from 10 feet away) as any excuse (not justfication - excuse!) for not producing images or videos that are better than that. What if I want to project a forest scene on an entire wall, and look for moths on the trees? Why should the resolution be limited to what an undeducated, squinty-eyed dork can pay attention to while stuffing chips in his mouth? Is it not better to ask, what's the best we can do _for the future_ when people might have more demands? We occasionally see clips from kinescopes - copies taken from a TV camera from the 1950s, that always look grainy, with poor resolution, etc. Do we want what we have now to look the same in 20 or 40 years? I would rather have the standards support something better than we can even technically do today, in order to meet the future head-on.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/