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LG's 84-inch 3840 x 2160 Television Doesn't Come Cheap: $17,000
An anonymous reader writes "LG held a big launch party today for its highly anticipated 84-inch Ultra HD TV. The launch was held at Video & Audio Center in the L.A. area, which sold six sets within two hours. The MSRP had been set at $19,999 but we now know the street price: $16,999. 'My wife would rather I waited,' said one of the buyers."
The article claims a couple of times that "Ultra HD 4K" has ~4000 vertical lines of resolution, but that's not true: the (unimplemented?) 8K spec is the one with 4320 lines of resolution confusingly enough. In any case, that's a lot of pixels. Maybe this means we'll finally see computer monitors break through the "HDTVs are the dominant consumers of LCD panels" barrier of 1920x1080.
correction: its 2K=2,4K=8,8K=32MP, forgot about the exponential growth :)
From wikipedia: "The name 4K is derived from the horizontal resolution, which is approximately 4,000 pixels."
Prepare to be corrected into oblivion. I'd do it myself, but I can't decide which of your asinine statements to make fun of first.
Saw this live here in Australia at the windows 8 Harvey Norman launch.
I'm not kidding you, a butterfly nearly landed on my nose, the 3D is that immersive. LG and passive specs will dominate the 3D home market in a decades time when 4k becomes cheap enough. I've owned a 55" active shutter samsung for 2 years now, the LG blows it out of the water.
Note, LG needed 4k to be able to produce full HD passive glasses 3D
My living room. I don't think I have 84" of wall space.
...for average use in the home 1920x1080 (1080p) *resolution* is not the problem for a ~60-70" TV (still considered high end!) from 10' away. The limiting factor for quality is still the encoding rate for anything less than BD bitrates. So, for anything other than physical media 4K is not even remotely practical, and even for physical media it's such a diminishing return few consumers will care. Combine that with the fact physical media is in decline and I don't see 4K adoption any time soon...
You surely mean Australia and not America?
The dilution of the UltraHD brand has already started, it is supposed to be 7680 × 4320.
I've been waiting for this since I have actually seen it work, it is quite amazing to watch TV at this resolution.
And anyone who says your eyes cannot resolve that kind of resolution are full of shit.
It's not 4 megapixels and no, 4k doesn't mean 4 mega for whatever reason you think that made sense.
It of course mean ~4000 but the difference is that it's columns rather than lines, so it would be 2160p so to speak to go with that name.
So it's neither of 4000 lines or 4 million pixels, it's 3840 columns. And 2160 lines.
How does one go from 4 megapixels to 4000 lines?
You tell us. Noone has made that claim. You just misunderstood it.
p isn't k and you never got the point for the explaination. As said, it's not 4 megapixels. It's 4k and it make sense to interpret that as 4 kilo and people are used to counting lines from 720p and 1080p.
And correct, no one say 1080p displays should have 2000 lines. Because the spec call for 1080 lines...
You surely mean Australia and not America?
Ssshhhh, he was proving his point. Nothing better than morons calling morons morons.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I can see people eventually using these as 'windows' on interior walls. Now we just need 4K video feeds from scenic locations like Yosemite Valley and we can all enjoy the view!
An 84 inch television is a massive waste of wall space, and of life.
17000 is expensive, but not excessive for a new piece of technology like that. 17000 today is dramatically less purchasing power than 25000 14 years ago for a medium sized plasma screen and people bought those, probably mostly companies bought them and the wealthier individuals.
This is another case in point for supply side economy (which is what all economy is). A company makes a product, which is expensive because the costs are high and few products are made and the production line is new and it's not fully automated probably. If people buy it at 17000 for a while, the market will signal the company that it is on the right track, as it figures out more efficiencies to push the prices down (and covers some of the upfront capital costs). If it's a good product that people are interested in, the market will provide this information to the manufacturer and prices will come down and more people will be able to buy.
That's what 'trickle down economics' means, not that rich people are supposed to shed money left right and centre and that somehow would make it into the hands of others. Making things and making more things and eventually lowering prices for things because of market buying at current prices and providing information that more of those things are needed, more competition enters the market, prices go down because of competition.
We'll see in 3 years whether this product is a success or not.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Screens past 1920x1080 have been available for a while. Hell, you can get CRTs from the late 1990s that go past that (though they were the high end).
It really baffles me why, after the resolutions of screens improving so much from the first composite video text monitors up to HD, they just... goddamn stopped. I want my 4K VR goggles from Snow Crash damnit! As it is, I settle for 2560x1600 @ 30". It's potentially problematic, in that I now find 1920x1080 (or God forbid 1280x1024) unspeakably cramped. What do you mean, I can't open two consoles, a web browser, a circuit layout program and irc all at once?
And just to get it out of the way, Obligatory XKCD.
Crap content seen at the highest possible resolution - justification 'waaaaah, wanit now!!!!!!!!!'
2560x1440 is already widely available in 27" IPS monitors for $400 (ebay imports) to $800 (brand name). So what are you complaining about? There's no 1080p barrier. Just be willing to spend more if you want nicer stuff.
The first large-ish (over 40") plasma TV I ever saw was a very early Pioneer model that was on display a the now-defunct "LaserLand" home theater store. It was hung on the wall within a roped-off area and had a price tag that said $45,000. That was in 1998. A few years later you could get a plasma TV for a tenth that price at Costco. Now we think a 4K resolution 84" display is high priced at a mere $17k? I'm being serious here, I'm surprised it's that cheap, honestly.
Is it just me, or does this thing really looks like four fullHD 42" panels put together in a single frame? Granted, it needs some new electronics to control it, but it does not strike me as something revolutionary, just an application of existing technology.
Real life is overrated.
Sure, they're only 2880x1800 or whatever, but hey, I could build a frickin' Beowulf cluster of 'em for the cost of this TV!
On a more serious note, a hypothetical future 21.5" panel (the smallest size used by the most popular desktops right now) with a "Retina" display (say, 200px) would be able to handle this kind of resolution natively. C'mon, panel manufacturers, get the yields up already, so we can have 'em by the time there's any content worth mentioning? /I'd also settle for a 4K projector I could hook a laptop to... oh, and a laptop with the video guts to drive it. I have a sneaky feeling my 2009-vintage one is lacking.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
since when is 8294400 equal to 4 million? 4k means "about 4 thousand lines vertically, cos it sounds way better than 2160p", 8k means "no relation to the resolution of the screen at all, it's just twice as good, honest"
How does one go from 4 megapixels to 4000 lines?
Well... every other TV in the store is labelled according to the number of lines it has.
No sig today...
Nice of you to keep Gerry Harvey company. He must've been getting lonely there before you showed up.
More dollars than sense. See the play on the word sense?
stupid suckers and they're money are easily parted. I read that the new ipad has a clearer display than top of the line HD TV's. These retards aren't opening up home cinemas to make money from the display, they're often buying on credit - once you lower the IQ of the general population enough, it makes it awfully hard to resist the case for removing people from their money.
Since 3840x2160 is 4 times as much as 1920x1080.
I don't know why the name was picked and I don't even know which one came first. I'm quite sure there was a 4k display at CeBit '99.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-definition_television
8k is four times as many pixels as 4k and twice as many columns :)
NHK demonstrated their system in September 2003 so maybe the high-resolution display at CeBit wasn't 4k. It was higher than I was used to at least :D.
Screens past 1920x1080 have been available for a while
They are not available in laptops. I've still got some 'old' Dell and HP laptops at work with 1920x1200 which have noticeably more screen space that the limited 1920x1080 crap that you can only buy today. I am simply not going to buy a laptop until this screen size problem is resolved.
The IBM T220 came out in 2001 and had 3840x2400 pixels, so yes, larger resolutions have been available for some time already.
Yeah, that 1920x1080 barrier is really annoying. Can't wait to get higher resolution in a display.
- Posted from a 2560 x 1440 27" display that is 3 years old, with the web browser window sized to 1920x1080.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
http://www.costco.co.uk/view/product/uk_catalog/cos_1,cos_1.1,cos_1.1.1/142976
I was doing some research on this, and it turns out you have the most accurate comment on /. right now regarding this subject!
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Now that Maybach is going out of business, any self respecting wannabe is going to have to get 12 of these for his house.
The price will come down quickly. A significant percentage of the population, after the price drop, will still feed it SD and rave about how wonderful it looks.
Question is, will a 40-inch 3840 x 2160 will be more expensive (more pixel density, harder to manufacture), or cheaper as per current tv-pricing logic?
4k or 8k refers to the horizontal pixel count, approximately 4,000 or 8,000 respectively.
TV sucks no matter what resolution and size you watch it in.
I bought my first 60" LG in 2000. It also cost 16k (wholesale however) so I'm no really suprised at this pricing.
I don't see any real need for Ultra-HD for TV or movie content, except for wealthy videophiles; unless you have a massive front-projection screen, it's not going to make much of a visible difference. (And even then, 1080p at a good bitrate is more than adequate for the average home theater setup.)
But it's really time that the average pixel density on monitors went up, and the prevalence of Ultra-HD would be a good thing for this reason. I currently use a 32" 1080p HDTV as my PC monitor, and it works well, but at a monitor viewing distance you can see the pixels, and text is less than razor-sharp. If I could get 4x the pixels in the same size (and set the Windows 7 DPI to 200% so that the text isn't too tiny to read), it would be a near-perfect monitor.
I would not be surprised if Apple chooses 3840x2160 for its Retina Display resolution on desktop Macs. It has a couple of advantages: there are already existing video cards (including newer Intel integrated GPUs) that support it, and it would be easier to convince panel factories to gear up for production when they think there might be a wider market (Ultra-HDTV) for their products as well.
Not even with Bluray.
What do you mean? People buying shit they don't need is exactly what keeps the economy growing. It creates jobs. If people bought stuff they needed, there wouldn't be many jobs would there? Does anyone need Halloween customers for dogs? No, but it gives people jobs.
Or, alternatively, the time and resources wasted on making Halloween customers (?costumes?) for dogs could be put to better use. Just a thought.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Because improving the resolution of an LCD is not like improving the resolution of a CRT, and there is a lot of price pressure.
To make a CRT support higher resolutions you need use better components capable of supporting high frequencies. You can go way beyond anything a computer can display, it is merely a question of cost. For LCDs you have to re-tool your factory to produce higher pixel densities, shrink the transistors and so forth.
Another problem is that operating systems don't scale well. Apple avoided that by simply doubling every pixel, but it created a rather extreme jump in resolution that didn't actually bring any extra usable space on screen. In fact most Ultrabooks come with higher usable resolution screens than a Retina MacBook, the MacBook just looks very nice.
So far there has been little demand for higher than 1920x1200 in computer monitors. Apple managed to make it a selling point that the average consumer is interested in. Hopefully once Google joins in next week we will start to see more interest. 4k is where it is going to have to go, in order to allow computers to scale to exactly twice 1920x1080 (and yes, Windows looks good at that resolution too).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If I'm reading this correctly, the TV doesn't actually support anything higher than a 1920x1080 ("1080p") signal input. So while it might in fact have a 3840x2160 panel, that panel is absolutely worthless, since it has to upscale everything that's being displayed.
It just marketing linqo.
Current Full HD would be considered 2K, so 4K is twice the horizontal resolution 1920 x 2 which is "about" 4000, 8K is four times Full HD so "about" 8000.
All you need to care about is 8k > 4k > Full HD > SD, don't fret about the resolution counts.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Umm it will make a visible difference because the contrast range in UHD is higher.
That's really where an improvement is needed, not the number of pixels.
What is pathetic is that the framerate is not improving. We are still looking at 24fps video with the wagon wheel effect.
Exactly this!
I got a Samsung 305T in 2009 for $999 (it had been on the market for 2 years already), and the price of 30" 2560x1600 has stayed at over $1000 since, even though HD-TVs in that size came down a lot over the same time period. With equivalent resolutions in tablets down to sub-$300 (U9GT5, Nexus 10), and cheapo Korean monitors 2560x1440 going below $400, why are 30"ers not coming down to, say, $600?
(That, or some 5th-generation descendent of T220 for $1000 would be nice...)
That is not the comprehensive list of video inputs though, the LAN being one which would handle any resolution we have currently. I'm surprised the thing has VGA and no DVI, what an oversight!
The Chinese produced a 77,460,000 x 50-pixel display ages ago to lock their competitors out of the marketplace. Eventually you get to a point where you can't see the whole thing from land, and you can't see it from space, so what's the point? All the pixels were stuck anyway, and whenever you lit it up there'd be smoke!
Costs have really come down, though. By some estimates, 1 million workers gave their lives building it. That's 3,873 pixels per life. Foxconn's averaging several trillion pixels per life these days.
Apple has resolved the screen size problem for laptops. You can buy 15 inch 2880x1800 laptops and 13 inch 2560x1600 laptops today, and if you want, you can run Windows or even Linux on them.
Lilly: It burns my eyes.
Barney: Yeah. That never goes away.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Actually 2K is really 2048 columns wide. It is just a few columns wider than FullHD, but some film workflows (camera, editing, projecting) is done at this resolution.
4K used to be actual 4096 columns wide as well, with cameras and editing done at this resolution. But then the display companies wanted to do 3840 columns and they diluted the term.
Also, apple is making a move to vector, rather than pixel, graphics with the iPad3 and retina macbook. (I bought both for the reduced eyestrain from things being that much rounder, but I depend on my vision and lots of screen reading for my living . . .)
As more programs adopt the vector rendering, scaling other than 2:1 will become practical.
When you get down to it, though, characters are already too small before this thing can't render them.
hawk