Ultra-High Definition Television Coming as Early as 2017

[Attebery]

http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com/art....jsp?id=890463

[AV_Integrated]

I'm wondering how content will be delivered and what the point really is considering most people have no ability to discern pixel structure as it is already. No content and no actual need...

It'll be interesting to see how this is presented as a reason for peoplel to upgrade.

The difference between SDTV and 720p/1080p HDTV was significant and there were YEARS of studios already having converted to HD broadcasting before HDTV really started to show any momentum or penetration at all.

5% penetration by 2021? Well, it certainly isn't a claim of anything immediate.

I think it is interesting that 5% is listed as the 'critical mass' penetration point for the technology. If that's a standard for consumer electronics products, then Blu-ray is well beyond that.

[JediFonger]

this is wishful thinking. it's like DVD-AUdio, SACD and even now Blu-Ray. people don't upgrade because of quality, they do so because of convenience. CDs were popular because they didn't wear out as fast upon replay and was portable and was convenient.

now it's all digital distribution and even CDs are on decline. it happened to music industry and it will happen to TV/Movie/video industry. DVDs decline, Blu-Rays are out yes but it'll decline too once download banwidth is expanded (c'mon FiOS!!!!). 3-D? easy to do over the internet already.

[Hastor]

I'm sure it will happen by then, if not sooner, and for a long while will just be a TV that can upscale to 2k or 4k. Just like we have 240hz TVs and no real need for anything over 120hz (since it is divisible by 60hz and 24hz), and all 240hz tvs do is add crappy "motion enhancement", upscaling the frame rate to make everything look like it was shot on cheap video by creating in-between frames that contain no actual detail from the source. Will be the same deal with higher resolutions for a long time. They will just make up in-between lines using formulas, that won't contain any actual extra detail.

[Headhunter]

I think the projected timeline for UHD is too soon.

Primarily, I don't think studios have enough content recorded at 2K and especially 4K available for distribution at those resolutions. It's already been a time and resource consuming endeavour for studios to release older material from their catalogs in 1080p, and a lot of the special features found on Blu-ray (and HD DVD before that) are still in standard definition.

There's also the consideration behind the special effects work that has gone into creating this programming, especially for television shows that were not designed to be shown on the larger canvas of a movie screen. I believe that most shows haven't created and rendered digital special effects for high definition until a few years ago (I'm using the upscaled SD effects from Firefly as a reference point), and I suspect that a lot of those shows don't have source assets that would hold up to a 2K and especially a 2K resolution.

Last but not least, it's already been a difficult battle for retailers to push adaption of HD media players and HD capable television sets. Asking consumers to upgrade yet again inside of a decade would be incredibly challenging, especially with the current worldwide economic difficulties (which I think will last for many years to come).

I'm intrigued, but I certainly wouldn't replace my Blu-ray media with UHD products at as high a rate as I have replaced my DVDs with Blu-ray/HD DVD (and even that was driven by my non-existent VHS collection).

[webdev511]

A lot of people can't tell the difference between 720p & 1080p. I wonder how they're going to do with 2k?

[Lee Stewart]

2K versus 4K:

Digital Cinema's Special K

In the standardization discussions for digital cinema distribution, there is an ongoing debate over how much resolution is required for preparation, delivery, and display of theatrical images. How much resolution is necessary to deliver higher quality than film distribution currently offers? What is possible, what is practical, what is necessary, and what is affordable? Is 4K resolution required at all stages, from capture to display, to preserve adequate image quality?

http://digitalcontentproducer.com/ma...nemas_special/

[BostonMA]

ahhhh 1080p and blu-ray will eventually be obsolete

[metalhead4]

Haha they can't even broadcast in 1080p yet lol. Let's take it one step at a time people.

[tyrok3k]

Can't wait for 7680p!

[rise2it]

...just what we need/want....4K resolution with massive artifacts from overcompression.

Get real.

[AV_Integrated]

Originally Posted by BostonMA

ahhhh 1080p and blu-ray will eventually be obsolete

Yeah, it may come as a real shocker to those people with their VCRs, 8-tracks, and cassette decks, that a format would go obsolete. Really quite the shock.

Someone go grab the 2600 game while I fire up the reel-to-reel. Wouldn't want to let technology move forward.

Seriously! 1080i broadcasts were out for years before HDTV started to make almost any dent at all in the sales of SDTVs.

I do think the biggest advantage will be that they will likely have some chip sets in place and can gouge consumers for BS amounts of money even though a physical format isn't likely and content delivery is completely non-existent at this time, and as far as I know, there aren't obvious talks of a next generation higher resolution format for content delivery.

The studios sure aren't likely to be changing their HD gear out which they just bought for at least another decade I would expect.

[worth]

Anything beyond 2K is massive overkill in a home setting. I've seen test footage of 35mm film scanned at both 2K and 4K, and even on a fifty foot screen, it was hard to discern much of a difference.

[Headhunter]

Originally Posted by AV_Integrated

Seriously! 1080i broadcasts were out for years before HDTV started to make almost any dent at all in the sales of SDTVs.

I do think the biggest advantage will be that they will likely have some chip sets in place and can gouge consumers for BS amounts of money even though a physical format isn't likely and content delivery is completely non-existent at this time, and as far as I know, there aren't obvious talks of a next generation higher resolution format for content delivery.

The thing is, there are significant challenges to a fully digital UHD distribution system. My rough guess would place 2K resolution movies or 4-episode bundles of hour long TV shows at well over 100 GB, even a multi-terabyte hard drive on a digital playback box would fill up pretty quickly (a complete run of something like CSI alone would be mind boggling).

The cost of 50 GB in hard drive space is way more than a BD-50 disc, and I don't see that cost:storage ratio changing significantly in the coming decade. If game consoles already see the need to roll out 250 GB hard drives (I think the PS3 version is out this week, the Xbox 360 version is part of the Modern Warfare 2 console later this month) when downloadable game/downloadable content size averages below 100 MB (based on the huge amount of games I own), it becomes really pricey for a non-optical solution.

This is all before we factor in massive bandwidth costs and caps (I'm limited to 95 GB a month on a $50/month package in Toronto), the inability to personally lend to others, the inability to professionally rent to customers and so on. I definitely think there's a market for digital services like Netflix Instant Queue, but there's also room for a high end physical product for the movies and TV shows that we enjoy.

This doesn't apply to game distribution, though. GameStop and its contemporaries have a losing battle on that front, as game sizes are tiny in comparison to HD media and are also not scaling up as quickly.

The studios sure aren't likely to be changing their HD gear out which they just bought for at least another decade I would expect.

Agreed. Also, I wonder how many productions that have gone from film to digital are using 2K instead of 4K.

Originally Posted by worth

Anything beyond 2K is massive overkill in a home setting. I've seen test footage of 35mm film scanned at both 2K and 4K, and even on a fifty foot screen, it was hard to discern much of a difference.

What was your viewing distance?

[lovswr]

Originally Posted by worth

Anything beyond 2K is massive overkill in a home setting. I've seen test footage of 35mm film scanned at both 2K and 4K, and even on a fifty foot screen, it was hard to discern much of a difference.

Well I guess the real next quantum leap will be some kind of Next Generation like Holography. But I'll take my flying Jetson's car first.


Also to the OP, those sets would be OLED, right?