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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.
From wikipedia: "The name 4K is derived from the horizontal resolution, which is approximately 4,000 pixels."
Let me be the first to welcome the LG marketing department to the thread.
Keep up the good work guys!
...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...
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...
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.
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.
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"
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.
Now that Maybach is going out of business, any self respecting wannabe is going to have to get 12 of these for his house.
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.
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.