Slashdot Mirror


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."

26 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Same old shit in high resolution! =D

    1. Re:Great! by Durrik · · Score: 3, Informative

      There's a good link I usually pass out when people start to talk about noticing the difference between 720p and 1080p.

      http://hd.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/

      Now I don't know where the line for 4320p would be since the article is old, but if you look at the line for 1080p at a viewing distance of 5 feet you need a TV around 38 inches. For 1440p at the same distance you need a TV around 51 inches, a difference of 13 inches.

      1080p is 2,073,600 pixels
      1440p is 3,571,200 pixels
      4320p is 33,177,600 pixels

      1440 is 1.33... times bigger than 1080
      3,571,200 is 1.72... times bigger than 2,073,600
      4320 is 3 times bigger than 1440
      33,177,600 is 9.29 times bigger than 3,571,200

      Using simple linear approximation:
      If you take just a 3 times bigger standard 1440p -> 4320p you need 29 more inches, or a TV that is 67 inches, or 3,571,200 -> 33,177,600 you need 70 more inches, or a TV that is 109 inches wide at 5 feet to get the full benefit of 4320p.

      I don't know about you but sitting 5 feet away from 109 inches wouldn't work for me. 67 inches is doable, but that's still a huge TV to be only 5 feet away. I don't think you can follow all the action across the entire screen from that distance.

      --
      Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
  2. screw that by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 4, Funny

    I am going to wait for CSUHDTV

    Crazy Super Ultra High Definition TV.

    1. Re:screw that by Idbar · · Score: 3, Funny

      And in other news, Comcast and AT&T said they will charge sh** loads of money for that service as well, and they will cap it (if you exceed 10GFrames per mo, they will only deliver at 5fps).

    2. Re:screw that by nschubach · · Score: 4, Funny

      I don't understand why they skipped Super HDTV ... anyone that grew up in the 80s knows that Super is before Ultra.

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    3. Re:screw that by hazydave · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's nominally 3840 x 2160, aka, "4K".. you get it, or something like it, at the better movie theaters these days. There are already camcorders shipping that do this, and televisions coming Real Soon Now (http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/22/3259613/lg-84-inch-4k-tv-korea-release-north-america-europe-latin-asia). YouTube already supports 4K video. HDMI 1.4 does, too, at least up to 24p.

      So if it's already real, it's hopefully not the subject of work on new standards. And the 4K stuff is coming on fast enough that it's all based on logical extensions to what already exists. TVs are smart enough to adapt to the input and reformat lower resolution video. Disc delivery doesn't matter as much as it used to, but just like 3D, if 4K is important in the home, a new Blu-ray profile will cover it (if you really want more storage, the existing BD-XL format might get employed).

      Starting out worrying about 8K video now, these guys will have the time to think about much larger changes in the video infrastructure.

      --
      -Dave Haynie
  3. Another piece of the puzzle. by mister2au · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 !!!

  4. Jarring clarity by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Funny

    The crabs on porn stars will look like invading sci-fi monsters.

    1. Re:Jarring clarity by oakgrove · · Score: 3, Funny

      And thusly a new sub-genre of fetish porn was born...

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
  5. Oh good... by wolrahnaes · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Oh good... by n5vb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We've already got something like that with ATSC standards, at least in the RF modulation schemes -- broadcast used 8-VSB (time domain), and the alternatives considered were OFDM (frequency domain) and 256-QAM (phase domain). Well, the cable industry is using 256-QAM and broadcast is using 8-VSB, last I heard, and I think what edged 8-VSB ahead for broadcast was that it's not sensitive to the phase jitter in antique GEO satellite transponders. So with modulation, at least, yeah, we're already there. (The fortunate thing is that, unlike when NTSC rolled out, TV manufacturers aren't forced to design around just one demodulation standard, and it's not all that difficult to incorporate both 8-VSB and 256-QAM demodulation in modern receivers, even within a single demod chipset, so for the most part you never notice it.)

      I suspect as standards get more and more complex, we'll start seeing a lot more of this kind of thing, and it will help rather than hurt, as the TV manufacturers design more and more agile multi-standard receivers that can handle anything the standards folks throw at them. Note that most if not all of them will also still display analog NTSC-M VSB-modulated signals just fine .. because there are still a lot of cable providers offering analog basic cable tiers ..

      (<- still thinks the way NTSC-M avoided obsoleting the first-gen monochrome TV's was a cool hack, even if the chroma performance sucked most of the time)

  6. Anyone seeing the point of this? by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Anyone seeing the point of this? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I was lucky enough to see a demo of Ultra High Definition a few years back when NHK was developing it. I didn't think you could get much better than 1080p, but it was actually noticeably better. What people forget is that it isn't simply the resolution that is higher, the colour is better and the frame rate has been bumped to a native 120fps. Everything looked hyper realistic and natural. Not the same level of improvement going from SD to HD, but the frame rate alone was enough to really set it apart.

      Having said that I was quite impressed by 4k and have not had an opportunity to compare 4k to Ultra HD. I'm kinda sceptical at how much improvement there would be over 4k/60p, but won't pass judgement until I have seen it. And of course it remains to be seen if 48 or 60 fps will take off for films.

      What I really can't understand is people who say they can't see any difference between SD and HD. Even if their eyesight is bad and they can't see the extra resolution they should still be able to see that the colour is better. Well, unless they have set their TV to be deliberately really low contrast, and I know one guy who does. 720p to 1080p is going to be more subtle because it is just a resolution bump, so really it depends on the size of your TV and your distance from it. I used to think a 50" TV was ridiculous, this year I bought one for less than a good 32" CRT set cost a decade ago...

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  7. Re:useless aspect ratio by Tridus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  8. Very disappointing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  9. Re:useless aspect ratio by Picass0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:I dont see the point, yet by oakgrove · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  11. Re:Already past what eye can resolve by pikine · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  12. Re:useless aspect ratio by Skarecrow77 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:Already past what eye can resolve by ledow · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  14. Experienced system in operation during Olympics by chicane · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  15. Re:useless aspect ratio by Tackhead · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So, why don't they make 1:1 monitors?

    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.

  16. Re:And people are going to watch this... how? by mister2au · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  17. Re:useless aspect ratio by hazydave · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  18. Re:useless aspect ratio by StuartHankins · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  19. Re:Already past what eye can resolve by garyebickford · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/