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Japan Starts 8K TV Broadcasts In Time For Rio Olympics (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Japan began the world's first regular 8K television broadcasts on Monday, five days ahead of the opening of the Olympic Games. 8K refers to broadcasts with a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 pixels. That's 16 times the resolution of today's full high-definition (FHD) broadcasts and four times that of the 4K standard, which is only just emerging in many other countries. The format used by NHK, which it calls "Super Hi-Vision," also features 22.2-channel surround sound. Public broadcaster NHK launched a satellite channel that will broadcast a mix of 8K and 4K content as it prepares to launch full-scale 8K transmissions in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. The channel will be on air daily from 10am until 5pm, with extended hours during the Rio Olympics. Japan's early lead in 8K broadcasting is thanks to NHK and its Science and Technology Research Laboratories in Tokyo.
and no one has a connection that can handle it.
This is needed so you can see the tracks on the arms of the athletes from the PED injections.
Just in time for all that high definition explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting.
The resolution is so crisp, so clear.. You can almost smell the sewage!
My Schwartz will look huge in 8K
..to negligible returns on resolution increases? I mean, I remember arguing against people who said 1080p was overkill... and I think 4K looks pretty cool up close on a big screen with the right source.
But 8k (and presumably, beyond) must surely be pressing hard on the limits of human eyesight.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
time, space & circumstance... us.. no destruction required.. cease fire stand down,, there's lots of reasons to stay above ground.. psychotic zionic nazi wmd on credit depopulation schemes are obsoletely fatal... no heart no spirit no life..
You can see every microbe.
Weren't some of the events broadcast in 3D for the last summer games? I guess that's not cool anymore.
While I appreciate Bluray, I just don't see the point of 4K and now 8K. Isn't DVD still outselling Bluray? It used to be VHS vs. DVD. The difference was noticeable on damn near any display size. From a normal distance DVD still looks good on a modest sized TV. I notice the difference on my 50 inch TV in my living room, but DVD is still very watchable. On my projector in my theater room, DVD can be a bit annoying in comparison. But Bluray still looks pretty good to me. I'm sure I would see the difference between 2K and 4K. But do we really need to have DVD, Bluray, 4K and 8K all competing at once? Is there any difference between the last three on a 40 inch television at 10 to 15 feet viewing distance? The sound on a Bluray is certainly a big improvement. But as far as I know, there's no difference sound wise between Bluray and 4K.
4K resolution is hard to notice at typical living room viewing distances of 8-10' with anything smaller than a 65" TV. 8K is going to only really make a difference in something larger than 80-90". Most people, even with 20/20 vision, have insufficient visual acuity to resolve such a resolution under these conditions. The vast majority of the public does not buy displays this big, and much less so in Japan where living spaces are tiny. 8K is a great resolution for large venue screens and for mezzanine/master files, but has little to no value for the consumer and imposes substantial costs on content creators, distributors and CE companies. As a point of comparison, some of my colleagues at a major movie studio were talking about scanning old film stock with 6K resolution and content with it. 8K is 4x as much storage as 4K, and we haven't even begun to talk about far more tangible technologies of importance like HDR and wide color gamut.
As for this 22.2 business, it is an infernal waste of time. The extra LFE channel (the ".2" in 22.2) is completely redundant because low frequencies should not be able to be located by the human ear in a properly set up theater, home, small or large venue. The 22 channels is an anachronism in the era of emergent object-based audio coding as found in AC-4 and MPEG-H audio. There, an arbitrary number of objects has position location information recorded in 3D space and relies on the playback rendering device to place the sounds in whatever speaker configuration may actually exist, from a single mono speaker in front of the viewer to dozens of speakers in an array as you'll find in a Dolby Atmos enabled theater. By channelizing audio, NHK not only forces an arbitrary speaker configuration on the viewer, but substantially complicates the job of downmixing to more traditional configurations such as 5.1 or 7.1, or even some of the newer configurations like 5.1+4 and 7.1+4 (the +4 indicating four height speakers over the listener/viewer), and is a complete waste of bandwidth, assuming they even carry the metadata and publish how the downmixing will be accomplished AND will be QC'd by a real person. Again, the producers, distributors and CE companies are behind the eight ball trying to support this nonsense in an era where only a very small fraction of people have 7.1 in the home, much less in Japan where premium audio solutions as you'll find in Akihabara consist almost exclusively of sound bars with speaker arrays that can do the same job.
Sorry to be so cynical about this, but there comes a point where this gets out of control for the average viewer and for the people who are in the industry making and distributing and playing back this content. NHK long jumped the shark even as nice as their jumbo display every broadcast show I have gone to may be.
Explain to me again why it's a good idea to provide twice the resolution that the human eye is capable of resolving. "Ohh, it's a bigger number, let's pay a lot more for it!" (The human eye can only perceive about 4000 separate regions in it's field of view, meaning making pixels smaller than 1/4000 of the screen does nothing for enhancing human perception, when viewing the whole screen. Greater resolution is useful if you move in closer and focus on just one section of the screen, but that's not really how we watch sports, is it?)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What's the point? The relative improvement from PAL to 720p, then FullHD, 4K, 8K is just getting smaller and smaller. Of course, if I focus on the details I can see the difference but I just don't care if I watch a movie in 720p or FullHD, it doesn't improve my experience. It may make sense in VR or 360 video, where you want to be able to change your viewing angle/zoom in, but in regular TV broadcasting it just doesn't matter.
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... now the nothing is in 8K resolution!
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
What we really need 8K video for is porn... it makes the herpes blisters look SOOOO much more realistic!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
We have a long history of standardized naming. "720p" and "1080p" referred to the vertical resolution of 1280x720 and 1920 x 1080p, respectively.
Then some marketing idiot starting calling the horizontal resolution of 3840x 2160 as "4K" so they could sell more TVs. No, it is 2160p.
This shenanigans of "8K" continuing by referring to the horizontal resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 needs to stop. This is almost as bad as drive manufacturers when they refer to disk space using GB, instead of GiB to artificially inflate their numbers. 8 KB is 8,000, and 8 KiB is 8192, not 7,680. Either call it 7.5K (7*1024 = 7680) or call it 4320p.
Lastly, 4320p is a non-issue. Most people don't care about 4320p due to the chicken-and-egg problem:
* No content, no sales of TVs.
* No sales of TV's, no incentive to make content.
Rinse and repeat.
spies.
You got knocked the FUCK out.
Don't even get me started on calling LCD screens with LED backlights "LED Displays" Ugh. Someone needs to be nuked from orbit.
The Rio Olympics will appear so clear in 8K you'll be able to feel your skin crawl with excitement.
16k is probably the highest sensible resolution for the home. I can see photographers wanting 32k or 64k. Beyond that, I have my doubts.
Porn in 8K resolution. There would be no way to hide any sort of blemish. You'll be able to see things that you will NEVER be able to un-see.
There is not enough eye bleach in the world to undo the damage suffered.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates said so.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
So in order to get that resolution in an OTA broadcast, do you start using several channels worth of bandwidth, or do you compress the living daylights out of it (with the resultant shitty picture quality, especially during motion), or both?
As someone else pointed out, this is kinda dumb, who is even going to notice the difference between 4K (which hasn't even really begun to roll out yet) and this? Also, as someone else pointed out, how many people are going to have the money or the room for a set big enough to display this? It all sounds kinda dumb.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I agree with you with regards to calling 3840x2160 4K and 7680x4320 8K. It's retarded.
I also agree with you with regards to storage manufacturers universally using the bullshit of "1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes".
But 7680 would be 7.68K. Why are you using 1024 there? Do you see a b or B indicating bytes?
Further, 1 KB = 1024 bytes. Always has, always will. Take your KiB nonsense and shove it.
It was just the easiest way to differentiate when both were on sale, and now it's stuck. It's not that people are stupid, it's that they are lazy. If you ask for an LCD TV watch out you might get stuck with a CCFL model.
Let's get even more pedantic! The p in 1080p refers to it being a progressive image rather than an interlaced image such as 1080i. 4K makes not mention of which it is so it's not directly comparable.
...you can see the viruses as they infect the athletes!
-Styopa
and do you really notice? 22.2? Give it to me another way, sister! You are a girl, right? Oh. My. God!
Why not really knock out the Olympics audience back home? Just add Smell-O-Vision.
if they don't tell you the bitrate.
4K (4096 x 2160) was originally a digital cinema resolution, but television people were jealous of it. However TV people only felt comfortable doing 4 quadrants of 1080p, thus we got 3840x2160.
Most "4K" TV production today uses 4 coaxial cables carrying 3 Gbps serial digital signals of 1080p. This is also known as "23 wrong ways to plug in your camera".
The hope is that everyone will shortly go to 25/40/100 GbE before 4K becomes a "standard operation" for television.
Make out every cell in Bandit's slit!
There was an article in Scientific American or something a few years about the upcoming resolution for video. They basically said 8K is being build out for all broadcasting. That way public places like airports, sports arenas, malls (if they still exit), billboards can display video feeds on 20ft screens or more and picture quality will look great. People at home who want the best video, especially those with home theater or other ways to have 8-10ft screen will also watch the same 8k feeds. secondary or smaller screens in the home will probably stay at 4K. Cinema on the other hand will probably go with a 16K or even 32K (Imax) video system. I'll try to find the article and post later.
Well I dont claim to speak for the japanese, but as a space conscious urbanite, i can tell you that projector screens and projectors actually save space. You can roll up the screen when you're not using it, and projectors are mounted on the ceiling in space you almost never use (1 ft drop from ceiling, 1-2ft diameter).
Far better than sacrificing premium wall real estate, and doubles as a set of blinds and sun shade.
As for the rest, people have said there is no benefit to some arbitrarily large number for ever. "640k ought to be enough for anybody".
I say bring on the 8k!
-
Now I'm looking for:
8K ready
3D ready
VR ready
And of course, *Curved*. Anything less than this has an obvious lack of gimmicks.
Out on the farm I jest got rid of my TV that ran on propane.
I would rather use that bandwidth for 300 fps framerate, no 8K, 24 fps "cinematic" junk.
8k is the next 1080p
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
All this resolution and sound stuff, and they're using it for what - sports? How stupid is that? There must be a market somewhere in Japan that wants to look at long-distance-runners' nosehair...
Seriously, why not opera (to just name one area where this technology would make things even better than 4K)?
As long as there's no overlap what's the problem? 4k is much easier to remember. I'm getting behind the new convention.
We'll actually be able to see the athlete's being attacked by the manifold microorganisms on offer by Rio. The amoeba are a solid lock for gold.
Consumer photography has significantly diminishing returns at higher pixel density. Sensor signal to noise generally decreases with decreasing pixel size. Are the broadcast camera sensors capable of recording high quality images in 8K resolution?
I'm starting a counter-revolution. If the ISO can arbitrarily redefine a KB as 1000 bytes, I can redefine KiB as 1000 bytes too.
Kilobyte = 1024 (JEDEC standard)
Kibibyte = 1000 (OSI counter-revolutionary freedom fries standard)
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah Japan is starting to broadcast 8k channels. What about the video actually coming from Brazil? I bet is at most the "UHD" resolution (not actually 4k as stated in these comments).
Great! So the TV I haven't even bought yet is already obsolete!
> But 7680 would be 7.68K.
Ah good catch. Thanks. I had bytes on the brain, not 7.68Kpx.
> Further, 1 KB = 1024 bytes. Always has, always will. Take your KiB nonsense and shove it.
100% Agree !
I guess the hardware engineers wanted an unambiguous term. But no one ever sends just 10 bits or 1,000 bits. They send 8 + header or 1,024 + header, etc.
We have a long history of standardized naming. "720p" and "1080p" referred to the vertical resolution of 1280x720 and 1920 x 1080p, respectively.
Then some marketing idiot starting calling the horizontal resolution of 3840x 2160 as "4K" so they could sell more TVs. No, it is 2160p.
This shenanigans of "8K" continuing by referring to the horizontal resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 needs to stop. This is almost as bad as drive manufacturers when they refer to disk space using GB, instead of GiB to artificially inflate their numbers. 8 KB is 8,000, and 8 KiB is 8192, not 7,680. Either call it 7.5K (7*1024 = 7680) or call it 4320p.
Lastly, 4320p is a non-issue. Most people don't care about 4320p due to the chicken-and-egg problem:
* No content, no sales of TVs.
* No sales of TV's, no incentive to make content.
Rinse and repeat.
This has an easy solution. The K that is made of horizontal pixels can be classified as K, or kilopixels. The real K that is made of vertical pixels can be kivepixels, or kVe. Make sure that terminology is correct as I stammer from a strong moment of deja vu.
Remember this day, though. In ten years, you'll be arguing that TV resolution used to be judged by vertical resolution, and new Slashdotters will argue that such a thing never happened and that the standard way is better, anyway.