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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.
Very, very few people. The point is, it wasn't really that long ago that 1080p screens were up around that price point.
You should try plugging the coax into an antenna, and you can get all the free channels (and probably sub-channels of the free stuff) in HD. There are a lot of DIY designs out there using very basic materials (lumber, tinfoil, coat hangers, wire), or you can spend well under $100 for a pretty decent pre-made antenna setup where you literally have to just make the cable connections.
Check out antennapoint.com to see where your nearest transmitters are and what you can get from your home. You might be pleasantly surprised. Most places you'll get the major networks and a few independents, plus PBS. In my area we get something like 20+ channels of programming in HD using an OTA antenna I built myself. We supplement with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, DVDs from our library, etc.
Truth be told, a lot of what is on cable nowadays is low-budget "reality" crap. IMHO the only bright spots are on HBO, and I'm not shelling out money for a cable subscription plus HBO on top of that. I can wait for DVDs. The networks and PBS actually still do quite a OK job with scripted stuff and science/educational programming.
$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?
2K and 4K refer to the horizontal resolution. QuadHD/3840x2160p (which is what this is) is only slightly smaller than 4K horizontally, so it is often referred to as 4K (same with regular 1920x1080p and 2K).
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.
....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.
Unrelated question: what connector would you use to feed them 3D at 50/60 Hz (so really, 100/120 Hz) at the native resolution?
It's in the article. Sorry I didn't see it:
Perhaps most worryingly, the 55ZL2 only accepts 4K video input through Toshiba’s proprietary “digital serial port” — and the only device that outputs to a digital serial port is Toshiba’s own professional, very expensive media servers. Hopefully the 84-inch model will accept 4K over HDMI, like the Sony and LG UHDTVs.
I'm reading it on a 22" 1080p display, and only because I'm not using the 17" 1080p display in my laptop.
I PAID for those black rows and I want to see them!
Well, you are in luck. Modern LCD and plasma TVs actually record the unused black lines and display them as a highlight package whenever you turn off the set. Don't believe me? Try turning off your TV now and tell us what you see.
And I'm reading slashdot on a 21.5 inch 1080p screen. However, I'm viewing it from 20 inches away.
Much beyond that viewing distance, it's overkill-- the added detail doesn't do much.
My 27" TV is perfectly fine for bluray, even though it's not 1080p. Were I to upgrade it, my chief consideration would be size-- (and preferably at a size where 1080p would make an actual, visible difference.)
I do have the "new iPad." The display's chief advantage seems to be the lack of color fringing. It doesn't need to anti-alias text.
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.