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Latest TVs Are Ready for Their Close-Ups (wsj.com)
An anonymous share a WSJ article: The latest televisions have more pixels than ever. But can your eyes detect the difference? The answer is yes -- if you sit close enough. Old TVs had 349,920 pixels. High-definition flat screens bumped up the total to 2 million. Ultrahigh-definition sets inflated it to 8 million. And manufacturers are now experimenting with 8K TVs that have an astounding 33 million pixels. More pixels render hair, fur and skin with greater detail, but the benefit depends on viewing the screen from an ideal distance so the sharpness of the images is clear, but the tiny points of illumination aren't individually distinguishable. According to standards set by the International Telecommunication Union, that ideal distance is 3 times the height of an HDTV screen, 1.5 times the height of a UHDTV screen and .75 times the height of an 8K screen (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; here's a PDF copy of the newspaper). Given those measurements, viewers should sit 6 feet away from a 50-inch HDTV with a 24.5-inch tall screen. But they should sit just 3 feet from a UHDTV of the same size, closer than most Americans prefer.
I have a 720 32" TV. Its good enough for the shows and games I play. Does that make me some how evil? The way marketing is going I feel that way sometimes.
I like the higher resolution picture but I prefer content. That might be why I like to buy DVD's a lot of the time over a BluRay. Same content and cheaper.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
The density race is pretty pointless as far as TVs on the wall go, but it has made for better monitors. I'm happy to have a 39" 4K monitor for a few hundred dollars, and I wouldn't have it if TV technology stagnated at 1080p.
They had an electron beam than scanned across a shadow mask to the phosphors underneath.
The limit was the bandwidth of the analog signal, resulting in a measure called lines of resolution.
Well, the shadow mask kind of imposed a pixelization of a sort, so it was not simply a limitation of the analog signal bandwidth.
Shadow mask <-- close up of one.
Old TVs still had resolution, measured in lines. The lines happened to be varying intensity, but you still only could see a few hundred lines per frame. (525 total, 483 active, and around 435 visible)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So we can see even more clearer now that the programming stinks, that the sitcoms ain't funny and that the thrillers are formulaic, predictable and anything but thrilling?
Seriously, I recently find way more entertainment in 30 year old shows than in the rubbish produced today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
8k is supposed to be the ultimate, the final form of 2D television.
Son, who are you kidding?
Joe Sixpack knows it, marketing knows it: higher is better
I predict 16k devices in 3...2...1...
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I used to print color positive slides with a Nikon 8K printer, it was a long time ago but I remember very well you can see the difference from 4K with a loupe. Undoubtedly the image will incredible though personally I would love one for my desktop.
That is true for Black and white. However Color TV's had phosphors setup to make a pixel. Because the analog signal needed to go up and down to create the color.
Even with Black and White, The glow of a phosphor on the screen was of a particular size. So this would limit its practical resolution.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In 8 billion pixels. I can't wait!
Unless it's a phone, then just strap the bad boy to my face!
120Hz native for ultra smooth, realistic motion
- Much higher dynamic range and more accurate colour rendering
Neither of these have anything to do with 8k other than sharing the same HDMI standard. Though I'll grant you that cheap 8k panels will have slightly higher color accuracy than their 4k counterparts due to less visible dithering.
You sound like an audiophile that think people can hear 96KHz/24bit audio. People don't even notice that cinema movies create less than 4K masters and blow them up on screens the size of a wall. And that most movies are shot in 24p because people want them to be. The biggest shortcoming of current screens is the contrast level and backlight bleeding, if you could get a screen that went from max HDR to perfect black that would be the biggest improvement. The second biggest improvement is color and there rec. 2020 is just huge compared to rec. 709, bigger than even reference monitors can provide. And despite stretching it for HDR the granularity of 10 bit color over 8 bit is also pretty huge. Oh yes and also the color volume, being able to do not only intense whiteness but also intense color.
Basically, if people saw a well-mastered 4K BluRay on a laser projector (which is as close as we get to a "perfect" image right now) I doubt anyone would care about 8K/12bit/120fps. The problems we have are far more mundane. And that goes doubly so for OTA broadcast, streaming or other bandwidth limited media. Personally I'm hoping for the "real" electroluminescent QLEDs to steal the show, not Samsung's latest quantum dot-enhanced LCDs but OLED-style perfect contrast with LED intensity and QD color accuracy. The first working early prototype was shown in May, at least a few more years out.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is why streaming still isn't as good as physical media. It's hard to see artifacts on a well-mastered Blu-Ray at 1080p. I haven't seen a 4K Blu-Ray, but since they use H.265 they should have plenty of room for a good quality image.
Of course, you're not competing with the real world. You're competing with the past. For the most part, this means film, but it can also just mean "at whatever resolution we eliminate all the digital artifacts we accidentally put it". This matters for both Hollywood movies, and for most TV shows.
Say you're watching a DVD source on a 4K screen. You interpolate to fill in the missing data, but that's more missing data than available data and the contrast is terrible. When your screen resolution is better than your source like this, you have to rely on little (but still visible) tricks like digital grain to make it look less unnatural (as they did relatively successfully with, say, the old A&E/BBC version of Pride & Prejudice, and less successfully with the movie 300. To avoid this entirely, you have to re-sample the original source at a higher rate, which means going back to a higher-resolution master. For older material that means film. For newer material, it may mean you're just SOL.
A case study: All the episodes of the original Star Trek were shot (including special effects), edited, and mastered on film. That master was broadcast using analog technology, or digitized to some resolution for DVDs, Blu-Ray, etc. When screen resolution goes up, you can't just upscale the DVD or Blu-Ray and get good results indefinitely: you have to go back to the master and re-capture a higher-resolution digital version from that. The resolution of 35mm film is roughly equivalent to 20 megapixels.
Most of the Next Generation was shot, edited, and mastered on film, but a few effects were produced and edited in using digital 3D. For those 3D models, they had to do some digital archaeology and re-creation to replace (not scale up) those effects without artifacts. And then you get to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, were a lot was modeled in 3D, and it was all edited and mastered digitally assuming the TV resolution of the time. There's no film master of higher resolution to go to, so DS9 (even the human actors) will just look worse and worse as the screen resolution goes up, forever.
Theoretically, 8K is approaching the point where you can good and truly digitally re-master most older media -- getting as good as you ever got with film -- and thus the point where the technology tops out... at least until Hollywood starts digitally filming in 16K.
This entirely misses the point of 8k. It's not just a resolution bump, it addresses multiple use-cases:
There is no "use-case" of sufficient utility to provide value to the vast majority of consumers in the market.
- Very large screens / projectors
Very large as in IMAX large.
Most movie theatres are still running 2k and nobody cares. Heck most movies are not even filmed in 4k.
- 120Hz native for ultra smooth, realistic motion
Most movies are currently filmed at 24 fps. IMAX runs at 48 fps.
Why stop at 120Hz? Why not 240Hz for even better smoother more ultraer, realistic motion? Or even 480Hz?
- Much higher dynamic range and more accurate colour rendering
- Comfortably exceeding the capabilities of your eyes in all situations
4k already does. It's overkill for most users.
8k is supposed to be the ultimate, the final form of 2D television. NHK, the people behind it, skipped over 4k because it's just a stepping stone to perfection. If anything is to blame here, it's 4k being a half measure and 8k not arriving quickly enough.
When you put things into perspective you quickly come to realize resolution of TV is irrelevant.
The limit of human vision useful for discriminating useful detail is 10 degrees of arc at a resolution of 60 pixels per degree or 600 x 600 per eye. Anything much more than that is unnecessary assuming 100% efficiency of projecting photons into the fovea.
A 80" 4k screen at 5 feet distance already exceeds the limit of human vision at 64 PPD as well as most peoples budgets for TVs or place to put them to say nothing of natural unwillingness to sit so close.
Actual current real world problem with TV that people will actually benefit from addressing is not resolution or frames per second or color depth. It's the willingness of content distributors to provide sufficient bandwidth to drive current displays.. displays that have been available commercially for the last decade.. at quality they are capable of producing.
The largest national cable companies have in recent years *DOWNGRADED* HD broadcasts from 1080 to 720 (excluding local retransmission) and turned up the compression knob leaving very noticeable blocking and motion artifacts in order to maximize profit. Satellite TV broadcasts are a joke and even OTA is starting to degrade as broadcasters are able to cram more content into available bandwidth via sub channels. Internet streaming has the advantage of modern and more rapidly upgradable codecs yet still insufficient bandwidth to practically deliver at quality limit of current generation of televisions. It isn't cost effective and more importantly most people either don't care enough to affect market behavior or can't tell the difference.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for content or a delivery mechanism to meet the capabilities of displays having been commercially available for more than 10 years let alone 4k and 8k.
8k is the equivalent resolution of 36 720p displays the max currently broadcast by major US cable companies. If people are willing to accept 720p with heavy compression on what planet is a broadcaster going to make the calculus ... hey we should use the bandwidth we would normally transmit to 36 users over point-point or 36 channels over broadcast medium just to deliver a single 8k channel to the handful of people who would appreciate it. How does THAT generate profit?
My own opinion is VR/AR/display/lightfield/GPU technology is likely to advance far faster in the next decades with far better results vs the likelihood of bandwidth requirements for transmission being rendered trivial.
People tended to hold onto them for as long as they were functional, which could be a decade or more. We had a 27" tube television which was 16 or so years old and still going strong when we replaced it with an HD set 10+ years ago (that old beast weighed something like 90 pounds too! I had a lot of fun hauling it away...).
And while Slashdotters are always more prone towards acquiring the new shiny toy, I suspect the average television owner still follows that principle... but the manufacturers keep trying (and generally failing) to induce people into treating their TVs as disposable gadgets which should be replaced every couple of years. 3D television was their first attempt; then 4K; now 8K. Meanwhile fewer people than ever are sitting down and staring at a television screen without also constantly texting on their phone or doing Facebook - it's doubtful they'd notice the increase in TV resolution even if they were a foot from the screen.
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Not all film is the same. Some directors (Kubrick, Kurosawa) shot their later work in 70mm. So did some hacks.
At the other end, you have 16mm.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There's one point many here have overlooked... it doesn't necessarily require a "UHD" TV to directly benefit from it.
Back around 1994, I bought my first "big" TV back when I was in college -- a 27" Daewoo. Nothing earthshaking, but it had higher-end specs... s-video input, decent stereo audio, and significantly better dot pitch than most of the other TVs at BrandsMart USA.
For the next 5 years, connected to a cable box and VCR, it mostly looked like shit. VHS tapes looked marginally less shitty at my house than at friends' houses, because I had a S-VHS VCR (mostly, so I could get S-Video output, even when watching non-SVHS tapes) -- they still had poor detail and awful color resolution, but at least the NTSC color artifacts were slightly better.
At one point, I contemplated buying a LaserDisc player. Unfortunately, by that time, LaserDisc was basically dead as a format in the US. In any case, a LaserDisc definitely wasn't something you could waltz into Blockbuster Video and rent for $5.
Then DVD arrived. Instantly, the TV's perceived video quality more than doubled. The TV's "real" physical resolution was somewhere around 360x480 under ideal conditions... but having a 720x480 video source to play with meant I could pump ever bit of signal detail into that TV that it was physically capable of handling. The improvement was dramatic.
The early 2000s arrived. My housemate bought a DLP HDTV, and we decided to switch to Voom! so we could enjoy "real" HDTV (at the time, Comcast in Miami hadn't started carrying HD channels yet, and only one or two of the local broadcasters were transmitting HD). As luck would have it, Voom! didn't screw around with "SD" boxes -- every box they gave you was capable of outputting anything from 480i60 over s-video (or composite, or component) to 720p60 and 1080i60 HD (over component or DVI). By this point, the old CRT TV from my college days was now my bedroom TV. And I quickly realized that even though it wasn't HD, Voom's channels (and OTA HDTV from the antenna diplexed into the LNB's output) looked MUCH better than anything I ever saw with cable.
Fast forward a bit more. Voom! went out of business, and my housemates and I were forced to settle for Comcast. God, it was awful. For a couple of days (before Voom shut down, after Comcast came to set us up), I was able to compare different channels from Voom and Comcast side by side. For SD channels like MTV, it was literally a night and day difference. On Voom!, MTV and MTV2 looked like DVD-quality video. On Comcast, I could barely watch it without feeling like my eyes were going to bleed from the blocky overcompression.
A couple of years later, I bought my own house, got a nice 65" DLP TV of my own, and signed up for DirecTV. I still had the same TV (from college) in the master bedroom, and decided to pay the extra $2/month to get a HD box for the master bedroom. Happy days again... DVD-quality, even from SD channels. Ditto, after switching to U-verse a couple of years later (a slight step down for HD, but more or less the same quality for 480i60 via S-video).
My point: most of the (2k, 720p60 or 1080i60) "HD" source available today via cable or streaming is very, very compressed... and Blu-Ray isn't necessarily a whole lot better (for economic reasons, most manufactured discs are single-layer, but studios feel like they need to shovel more and more stuff onto the discs, and it's usually the main video stream whose bitrate suffers the most). HOWEVER, even if it's horrifically overcompressed, "4k" UHD is STILL basically 2k HD with 4x oversampling, which means you can compress the hell out of a 4K UHD stream and STILL have it be a net improvement over what you WOULD have gotten from a real-world 720p60 or 1080i60 "2k" stream.
There's one small fly in the ointment now -- HDMI and HDCP. HDMI, because it allows the video source to ask what resolutions the TV supports instead of allowing you to forcibly set them with DIP switches or an explicit menu option. HDCP, because it means it's now a lot har
I believe this is the reason that we will never see HD episode of B5 on BR. While all the live action scenes where shot on 35mm film, all the space shots where CGI. Which was primitive at the time. They had banks of Amiga 2000/3000 doing the rendering.
All these scenes where shot in 4x3 format and at low resolution. They wouldn't scale well to a new format and would have to be completely redone. It would just be to expensive and the powers that BE don't believe it would be worth the cost.
I believe that I read some where the master tapes containing the CGI models has since been lost or destroyed.
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DS9 (even the human actors) will just look worse and worse as the screen resolution goes up, forever.
No, DS9 won't look worse and worse. It just:
* won't look better
* will look perceptually "worse" relative to newer things
but it actually will never look worse per se.
Assuming the original models are available, there's no reason why a modern Beowolf cluster of couldn't be redone at a higher res
While I do believe the original models where lost, you still can't just drop a model in and render it at a higher res. Not if the original models where rendered and created at the low resolution. It's like blowing up a low rez jpeg image and sticking it on the side of a building. There just isn't enough information in model for it work.
You could resize the skeleton but you will still have to manually re-texture all the models. Like the jpeg example I believer there are algorithms that would help but I doubt they would be effective.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
In the analog TVs and monitors, there was pixelization of a sort.
- In the vertical dimension there were scan lines.
- In the horizontal there was bandwidth / sweep rate, which limited the sharpness of focus, creating what amounted to a "pixel width" and thus a "pixel count", though there weren't discrete pixels with well-defined boundary locations.
In black-and-white that was it. In color it got more complicated:
- The shadow mask and pattern of color phosphors created physical pixels - but the spacing of them was tight compared to the focus of the electron beam and the bandwidth of modulation. So the information/focus/bandwidth-vs-sweep-rate pixels covered several of these physical dots.
- While directly cabled R-G-B signals were three separate analog signals, in NTSC the color information was separated and transmitted at a lower bandwidth (and thus lower resolution) on a phase-and-amplitude modulated subcarrier. This both limited the bandwidth - widening the "pixels" of color information - and tended to quantize it into discrete dots centered on particular phases of the subcarrier. (The subcarrier phase was shifted by 180 degrees between scans, both to make the color information collide less with the black-and-white information and to reduce visual moire patterns from the dots lining up and from crosstalk between the B&W and the color info signals.)
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And that most movies are shot in 24p because people want them to be.
And that's because people are used to movies looking like garbage. It's embarrassing when low budget TV looks much better than juddery blurry multi-million dollar film content.
The only way to enjoy such horrible content is on home TVs that, since the early 2000's, interpolate PTZ motion and generate intermediate frames, giving some semblance of smooth motion on a 60 or 120 Hz TV. Efforts such as Peter Jackson's The Hobbit that were filmed and presented at 48fps looked gorgeous compared to the status quo, but are of course just a stepping stone and were mostly panned by luddites complaining of motion sickness or that it looks cheap "somehow".
Seriously, go look up the Soap Opera Effect.
Even modern YouTube videos are now at 60fps, since content creators are finally getting the point that lower frame rates look like ass.
Other than that, though, I agree with what you said.
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You missed the point. All these are cgi of space shots and battles. There are no actors involved in this. I believe all the original scenes are rendered in the Amiga's default resolution, which is 320x200. To redo them to HD standards would take hundreds of man hours to redo all of them. Even with the original models.
With out the original models everything would have to be redone from scratch. I doubt any studio would be willing to foot the bill for a 20+ year old tv series that only a few die hard fans remember.
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