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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.
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.
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.
8k and 4K content is ready in the form of most movies -very old and new.
It just a matter of clean up, encoding and selling.
In the past HD and dvd was the final output target, but the back end went for 4/8k.
So there is a lot of great 4/8k material waiting, encoded, cleaned and audio ready.
The real trick is the new medium to sell it back.
Region coding, encryption, consumer codec payments, release dates and branding will be the fun part.
Can parts of the world with optical to the home do anything good in an expected movie watching time with this amount of data?
Terrestial transmission?
Or the dream of a new dvd/bluray like buy up craze with some strange cube of "data"?
No moving parts but expensive hyped adaptive networked realtime encryption.
A movie just for you for one night and not an hour longer.
If your internet fails, no movie for you?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
....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.
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.