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4K UHDTV Hardware On Display in Berlin, And On Sale In Korea
First the spec, and now the hardware: MrSeb writes "After five years of trying to convince us that 3D TVs are the future, it seems TV makers are finally ready to move on — to 4K UHDTV. At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, Sony, Toshiba, and LG are all showing off 84-inch 4K (3840×2160) TVs. These aren't just vaporware, either: LG's TV is on sale now in Korea (and later this month in the US), Sony's is due later this year, and Toshiba will follow in the new year. Be warned, though: all three will cost more than $20,000 when they go on sale in the US — oh, and there's still no 4K Blu-ray spec, and no such thing as 4K broadcast TV. In other display-related news, Panasonic is showing off a humongous 145-inch 8K (7680x4320) plasma TV, and some cute 20-inch 4K displays — but unfortunately neither are likely to find their way to your living room or office in the near future."
How about a 4k or 8k 27" monitor? They can market it as a TV if they want too.
i got tired of paying for cable and don't even care that most of my stuff isn't HD anymore. i plugged the cable coax into my TV and i still get the free channels at barely SD resolution
am i missing anything?
With the right person doing it, $20k can 'buy you' a lot of life experiences that you'll never forget. Or it can buy you a 'super high def' television set.
I always thought I was a technology fan, but as I find myself becoming older, I keep thinking: "This is insane.".
Who would honestly consider spending $20k on a television?
4k denotes 4096 pixels horizontal resolution. These are "quadHD" screens and should be measured using vertical resolution at 2160 pixels.
I invite everyone who insists on calling quadHD screens 4k to hand me $4096 and I'll hand them $3840 right back.
1088 + 1088 = 2176
Who stole my 16 rows ??
No need for native 4k right away.
If someone comes out with a box that can combine 4 HDMI video streams, these new TVs will be used in lots of places as video walls. Sports bars, airports, TV editing suites, surveillance posts, etc. Plus all the people that want to have a mess of channels displayed at once. Console video players, maybe?
For true information gluttons, 16 video streams on 8k monitors.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I thought a 2K display was a display with around 2K lines and 4K was around 4K lines (i.e. 4x the resolution of 2K). Obviously I have it wrong. Can someone please explain this to me?
$20K+ and there's no 4K content? Yeah, that makes lots of sense. Still no standard broadcast TV @ 1080p, although Directv has some ppv movies at that standard. I just cannot for the life of me figure out how this makes any sense for the companies involved - let alone the consumer. All we need is an additional consumer movie disc format, ughh. How about getting everything up to 1080p standard before we look too far ahead?
1088 + 1088 = 2176
Who stole my 16 rows ??
2+1+7+6 = 16
There are your 16 rows. But fun equations aside, HD resolution is 1920x1080. It is encoded on video streams as 1088 lines because the MPEG2 standard requires that the resolution be divisible by 16. The extra 8 rows are not displayed.
You are not being ripped off, because those extra rows on the video would probably just be black.
So now I have Betamax, VHS, Laserdisk, DVD and Blueray. Soon I must buy everything again for my UHDTV.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
..the current 1080p resolution ( now presumed near obsolete given this new tech ) actually reaches the 20 inch market.
It just barely made it into the sub forty inch market in the past year, but you find many more 17 - ish screens on display than actual 32 and 37 sizes now. Probably as vanity kitchen or portable laptop resolution facilitators.
At least this 4K boldness means that marketwise we'e a step closer top seeing near retina display production on our laptops. Because last 8 checked 8oopx is a horrible place for 3D games and even google maps.
You are not being ripped off, because those extra rows on the video would probably just be black.
I PAID for those black rows and I want to see them!
....where people can afford to buy the highest tech available anywhere in the world, and that tech is actually manufactured there!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It's not "Ultra" HD, they should use "Very" HD for 4K then they can use "Ultra" for 8K. Now they have to start calling the next ones XSUHDTV (eXtra Super Ultra) etc ..
Unrelated question: what connector would you use to feed them 3D at 50/60 Hz (so really, 100/120 Hz) at the native resolution?
as there is NO 4K content out there, nor will there be any for a long time.
We had 720P sets for nearly 5 years before people could buy BluRay players or even tune in a HD channel in their area.
broadcast, CATV and Satellite will NOT broadcast 4K content.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
good regular HD? 4K would only mean more expensive service with even worse overcompression.
For TV watching, this is probably overkill; even once 4K source material becomes available, the difference is going to be very hard to notice unless you are sitting extremely close to the TV, or are using a front projector with a giant movie screen. (Even then, 1080p looks nice enough with a front projector to satisfy all but the most demanding cinemaphiles.)
However, they could be far more useful as PC accessories. Once these drop to more reasonable prices ($1000-$2000) and are available in somewhat smaller sizes (32"-40"), they would make very nice monitors. I see from the previous posts that others are already thinking along these lines. It's about time that PCs escaped the tyranny of low-DPI, mass-market 1080p panels.
They should spend more time trying to push oled into consumer level displays rather than expand on the lcd model. lcds in the grand scheme of things are 100% temporary garbage displays. We have the ability to do consumer grade oleds today but for some reason display manufacturers don't care. They would rather sell an inferior technology for 100x more than most people will be willing to pay.
It took dozens and dozens of years to FINALLY get HDTV out there and available and affordable also also have content. The idea of breaking all the standards yet again is unnerving.
I can't see any reason for these UHDTV's at all. On smaller sets, consumers can barely tell the difference between SD and 720P. On larger sets they probably can't even tell the difference between 720P and 1080I/P.
Really, for television, unless you have a 100+ inch TV and are sitting rather close, more than 1080P is just a uber-geek thing.
I've only bought 4 TVs brand new since 1990, and they all worked fine when I got rid of 3 of them, including the 22 year old Trinitron. I got rid of them not because they broke, but because they were all functionally obsolete in some way.
I think what's needed isn't really longer life but coming up with some way to eliminate as much of the intelligence as possible from the display. Set top boxes kind of do this, but they're not really meant to be "display controllers" and don't perform some of the intelligence functions of the TV itself.
We need a "controller" and a "display" with an interface between them that is high resolution/bandwidth enough to handle at least 3 generations of future TV (ie, 4k, 8k, 16k..).
The controller should do everything that the built-in controller on a TV does now: switch between inputs, providing scaling, upconvert/downconvert for input sources to match the display itself, ATSC tuning (perhaps with cable card capability), P-I-P and other alternative display modes, provide basic audio functions and some of the "smart TV" functions you see cropping up now everywhere.
You can do this now with a combination of maybe a tuner with HDMI switching and a DVR, but it's kind of a compromise. Even a $1200 Pioneer receiver won't downconvert HDMI to a component-connected TV (or, more maddeningly, digital audio to analog).
With a controller designed to actually replace the intelligence and features within a TV, replacing your display would be easier and have no impact on the devices that send you video signals.
Are these gonna be cinema aspect ratio (e.g. 64x27) or just HDTV aspect ratio (e.g. 16x9) or office computer aspect ratio (e.g. 8x5) or legacy TV aspect ratio (e.g. 4x3)? I want 4096x1728.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
People don't need bigger screens, they need smaller houses.
I don't know about that. I have a much easier time watching a movie on a 100" projector screen than I have watching it on my laptop or even the 40" TV in the same resolution. My eyes are a lot more relaxed and the movie can cover my field of view without causing eye strain from a comfortable distance. My friend who normally has to wear glasses found that he was able to see it fine without.
The images look amazing! :)
The sales guy said it was due for 2020 along with broadcasting (in Japan).
That gives me a few years to settle there and make loads of money to buy one, I guess
It makes the whole "new higher resolution every couple of years" thing easy to ignore. My TV is a 27" hunk of glass made in 1997.
...and if they can can get a high quality image that fills their field of view with sound that is powerful and convincing, that is good enough for some people to feel like they have actually experienced something, as opposed to just "watching" it.
Of course, most of the people who can afford to create these artificial experiences in their home somewhat convincingly can also afford to actually go to places and have the real life experiences to which you are likely referring. But then, a convincing presentation of something is the closest ANY person can get to "experiencing" events and places that can't possibly be experienced in real life.
I'd never grant that movies can be a substitute for actually going places and interacting with the environment and the people, especially as someone who usually chooses to spend disposable income on travel instead of upgrading the home theater. However with the right presentation and material, movies the can be life experiences you'll never forget.
No point of buying a 4K res TV if there is no content.
I mean those new 22nm processors those aren't built in... oh what's that? They are made in Chandler, Arizona? Oh.
Please, come off the bullshit of "The US doesn't make anything high tech." In fact, the US makes a shit ton of high tech. As I said, all those nifty Ivy Bridge processors are fabbed in the US. That is just one example.
Countries often specialize in things and get so good at them that few others compete. For example Japan and camera lenses. There are other countries that make them, but the lion's share come from Japan. Well for LCDs it is Korea. They have three of the four major LCD makers there (AU Optronics, LG.Displays and Samsung). So it is no surprise that when they roll out a new LCD for very limited distribution, that's where you see it first.
If you are unaware of the high tech stuff the US makes, the failing is yours not the US's. I just gave you one example, Intel processors (most of Intel's fabs are in the US, including all of their highest tech ones) you can find many more.
Movies are shot in all kinds of aspect ratios. Just depends on the kind of lens the director chooses for an anamorphic film, or the kind of matte for a spherical. Common anamoriphic ratios are 1.44:1 IMAX, 1.77:1 ATSC, 1.85:1 3 perf, 2:1 SuperScope (also what Red shoots in), 2.39:1 Panavision, 2.55:1 Cinemascope.
These are just some of the more common ones you see in theaters, and as I said just the anamorphic ones. There are other movies that are shot on spherical glass and then matted down, like Fight Club, that can be anything since there is no special lens required.
The new screens will be 1.77:1, aka 16:9. You can't spec a screen that's perfect for cinema because of the varied ratios. I'm not sure how the 16:9 ratio for ATSC came about but it is quite standard these days so it is what will continue, for now.