Whatever happened to 4K? The rise of “Ultra HD” TV
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Good thing they're not calling them 4K. After all, it's not like these sets are 4096x2160 (4K D-Cinema resolution)
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The problem I'm going to have with the transition to UltraHD / 4K is the required viewing distance is uncomfortable. I have a 55" TV and I need to be prohibitively close to be able to see the pixels.
http://www.marseilleinc.com/recommended ... resolution
http://www.marseilleinc.com/recommended ... resolution
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I still prefer projectors...
TV's just take up to much space, even hanging on the wall.
I don't care all that much about quality after a certain point and projectors always seem to give me way more bang for my buck.
TV's just take up to much space, even hanging on the wall.
I don't care all that much about quality after a certain point and projectors always seem to give me way more bang for my buck.
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I would suspect that marketing is the answer to the question. TV manufacturers don't want consumers to see a "4K TV" and an "8K TV" in the future, they want something that is "Ultra HD" which implies it's better than HD but related. It also provides some ambiguity to help sell what will eventually be 'lower end' 4K sets when 8K sets become the norm. "Hey, they are both Ultra HD!"
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Damn near impossible to see a difference between 1080p and 4k without having a large set and sitting far closer than you'd ever comfortably want to at home. When you're pushing the limits of what the human eye is capable of detecting, I think it's time to pack it in.
But that's just my opinion.
But that's just my opinion.
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What will they call the next standard after that? Super Awesome Exclusive Deluxe Limited Edition Ultra HD?
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Uhh... it's actually pretty easy to say why all the TV manufacturers have decided to call everything "Ultra HD". The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA, they also run CES) announced the change almost 3 months ago: http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/20/cea- ... -flood-of/
No diabolical plan here.
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We need more than just higher resolutions for TVs. The Hobbit is being shown at 48FPS, while Avatar sequels will be 60FPS. People *can* see the differences and many will prefer the higher frame rates on their programming.
Whatever the updated delivery mechanism (physical or streaming) to these higher resolutions should also include higher frame rate possibilities as well.
Whatever the updated delivery mechanism (physical or streaming) to these higher resolutions should also include higher frame rate possibilities as well.
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I find it annoying that we went from vertical counts like 720 and 1080 to horizontal counts like 4K. I'd have much preferred the next tier after 1080p to be 2160p or w/e.
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When do we get uncompressed HD? Most "HD" Stations looks like utter crap. I shouldn't be seeing artifacts at the price they charge for cable/fios.
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Plain and simple, I assume the names have been focus group tested, and "Ultra HD" tests substantially better than "4k". Not surprising really, and I think the article nails it:
Customer: What is that?
Salesmonkey: It's a 4k TV!
Customer: What does the 4k mean? Is that the price?
Salesmonkey: Ha hah, you wish! No, it's the TV resolution, which is 2160p, also defined as...
Customer: zzzzzz, I'm sorry, I must have nodded off there.
Or
Customer: What is that?
Salesmonkey: It's an Ultra HD TV!
Customer: Sweet, I like my things in ultra!
Still, until these beasts start coming down to just a bit more than normal HDTV prices, I don't think they're going anywhere. I think they'll have a similar transition rate between DVDs and BluRays, rather than VHS and DVDs for the same reasoning. The discernible quality difference between VHS and DVDs and standard definition TVs versus HDTVs is huge compared with the next leap up to BluRay and 4k TV. So I don't think many people will see a need to upgrade quickly. Plus, as being one of the people who spent $1,400 on a new TV a few years back, I'm in NO hurry to go buy the new shiny at 10x that cost. Let me get 10 years out of that thing (I hope), and I'll get back to you.
Customer: What is that?
Salesmonkey: It's a 4k TV!
Customer: What does the 4k mean? Is that the price?
Salesmonkey: Ha hah, you wish! No, it's the TV resolution, which is 2160p, also defined as...
Customer: zzzzzz, I'm sorry, I must have nodded off there.
Or
Customer: What is that?
Salesmonkey: It's an Ultra HD TV!
Customer: Sweet, I like my things in ultra!
Still, until these beasts start coming down to just a bit more than normal HDTV prices, I don't think they're going anywhere. I think they'll have a similar transition rate between DVDs and BluRays, rather than VHS and DVDs for the same reasoning. The discernible quality difference between VHS and DVDs and standard definition TVs versus HDTVs is huge compared with the next leap up to BluRay and 4k TV. So I don't think many people will see a need to upgrade quickly. Plus, as being one of the people who spent $1,400 on a new TV a few years back, I'm in NO hurry to go buy the new shiny at 10x that cost. Let me get 10 years out of that thing (I hope), and I'll get back to you.
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I think the term 4K is confusing. Until very recently, I thought that 4K meant around 4000 line resolution as we always refer to current resolutions by mentioning the number of lines (720p, 1080p) I simply assumed they also referred to the number of lines and not to 4 times the area in pixel as it is actually the case.
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Not quite. Industry standards call for one added descriptor/adjective per generation. Next one would be the Limited Edition Ultra HD, followed by the Deluxe Limited Edition Ultra HD, and so forth. The TV you described would be an eighth generation unit if factored for Standard Definition and HD.Dilbert":b586h87e said:
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Nitpick, 8K is NOT 7680p, it's 4320p, in other words: 7680 × 4320. (Since 1920x1080 is 1080p, etc..). I was doing the math in my head and realized that 8k is either badly named, or something else is up (7680p, at 16x9 aspect ratio, would be ~13654x7680, or 12 times the pixels of 4k, rather than 4x the pixels).
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mkuch90":2cevtd97 said:
Isn't the goal to not see the pixels? There is a distance beyond which you will not see the difference between 720 and 1080, and likewise a distance beyond which you will not see the difference between 1080 and 4K, but that's not about image quality, it's about getting value for expense.
We have the TV too far away, which has the result that the viewed image is smaller as a proportion of field of view, but it looks clear enough.
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Ars wrote an excellent piece on 4k resolution TVs and the perceivable difference it has on movies and television last summer.
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This is so annoying.
We shouldn't bump up the resolution again until we can trivially capture, store, transmit, and display 1080p at 4:4:4, with lossless compression.
What's the point of increasing the resolution of a noisy luminance channel while crushing the ever living hell out of the chrominance channel?
It'd be so awesome to see a nature documentary that any frame you pause on (where the camera isn't moving) is camera quality (allowing for the fact that the video camera is doing autofocus and isn't optimizing exposure/depth of field like a photographer would).
As is, the best blue ray when paused, looks like you took a jpeg and compressed it 4 more times.
We shouldn't bump up the resolution again until we can trivially capture, store, transmit, and display 1080p at 4:4:4, with lossless compression.
What's the point of increasing the resolution of a noisy luminance channel while crushing the ever living hell out of the chrominance channel?
It'd be so awesome to see a nature documentary that any frame you pause on (where the camera isn't moving) is camera quality (allowing for the fact that the video camera is doing autofocus and isn't optimizing exposure/depth of field like a photographer would).
As is, the best blue ray when paused, looks like you took a jpeg and compressed it 4 more times.
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Is ars going to review the Odemax 4k distribution service when it launches at sundance ?
and the redray player ?
http://www.red.com/news/red-announces-p ... ith-odemax
http://odemax.com/information.html
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread ... RAY-ODEMAX
They are going to be using the red ray codec, supposedly have had a break through and got it way down on bandwidth 2.5MB a second for streaming 4k video
http://www.redgrabs.com/up/1354328970.jpg
Also in Europe there is a dedicated 4k demo satelite channel that started on tuesday
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... 93172.html
and the redray player ?
http://www.red.com/news/red-announces-p ... ith-odemax
http://odemax.com/information.html
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread ... RAY-ODEMAX
They are going to be using the red ray codec, supposedly have had a break through and got it way down on bandwidth 2.5MB a second for streaming 4k video
http://www.redgrabs.com/up/1354328970.jpg
Also in Europe there is a dedicated 4k demo satelite channel that started on tuesday
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... 93172.html
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Spungy":btxe2zel said:
Me too, from about 10 - 15 feet away in my living room, 480p widescreen zoomed looks "good enough"
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Awesome. No one really cares, because there is no content, and the ridiculous re-tooling of all our infrastructure is just not going to happen nearly as fast as the ITU (or whomever) is bumping TV set resolutions.....
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JTD121":16rcdyv8 said:
There is content but not from the major studios and usual providers yet.
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The great thing about "Ultra HD" is that 1080p HDTV's will get dirt cheap in a couple of years. I am talking sub-$300 bucks for a large one. Which will kick ass. Huge HDTV's for everyone! =D
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There is no such thing as "enough" when it comes to screen size or resolution. No matter how big it is, your TV is not big enough until it fills your vision, and then it's just time to move further away. At 6' away, 60" is too small.
As for the ITU, allocators gonna allocate.....
As for the ITU, allocators gonna allocate.....
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trappera":1sfriy0d said:
I am building a "theater" in my basement, Projector is the way to go, especially due to the lack of light pollution with my basically windowless basement.
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xryancat":kvl7l56w said:Ars wrote an excellent piece on 4k resolution TVs and the perceivable difference it has on movies and television last summer.
Thanks for the chart
! In my living room I would have to watch my tv at about 2 feet to tell the difference between Super-Mega-Ultra-Full HD and plain old boring 1080p.
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fizzlefist":3qg7fmgg said:
There is some weight to that sentiment but I don't think it's entirely true since it mostly depends on the content. While video will likely see small benefit to most users, the jump is quite significant when you're dealing with vectors and computer generated images like you would see in console gaming. Under those scenarios, 4k resolution offers the same benefit as the 'retina' displays in current Apple products. It's effectively 4x SSAA without the downsampling.
I would agree that televisions aren't the prime candidate for such resolutions but they make the most sense from the marketing perspective of a panel manufacturer. The best actual application lies in those computer displays that will follow in a few years.
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jdale":tg0yl07v said:
That's what I mean. In order to get a noticeable decrease in quality on my TV, I need to sit closer than is comfortable. My seat about 7-8 feet from my screen, but it needs to be about 5-6 feet away before the image degrades. An Ultra-HD screen would need to be absolutely massive in order to justify the number of pixels when sitting 8 feet away.
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Topevoli":2ylde3s4 said:
Just because a lot of video is compressed too much, getting rid of compression is not the answer.
Cranking up the bit rate will improve quality significantly, but after a certain point the return is extremely diminished. Getting rid of compression will then perhaps improve perceived quality from 99.99% to a 100% (if at all, given digital noise at the sensor level), but explode the file size so much that it just isn't a good a deal. There are always better uses for bandwidth.
Compression is fine, we'd just need slightly higher bitrates...
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cervier":1osnr7s6 said:
That's mostly myths and misconceptions as the human eye doesn't really see in frames per second. There was research done that I remember reading years ago that found that eyes could adjust to almost any frames they were given ignoring frames as needed. The human eyes don't visually see every frame as far as I understand; they might see frame 1 and frame 5 while the human brain will fill in the frames in between. That gives the appearance of a smooth moving object.
Increasing the frame rate to a point seems to have a hyper realistic and almost jarring effect on some people watching the new Hobbit. I would speculate this is something like your eyes are seeing more frames visually than they want and while they're trying to simulate the frames in between they are also seeing the frames and the two aren't matching up.
I've only done casual reading about the subject and it was mostly done awhile ago but I actually did some tests myself at the time. While playing some first person shooters at 120 frames per second for a month or two and then switching down to 60 frames per second I noticed a difference visually but it's hard to explain; it's like your eyes are trying to re-figure out how to simulate the frames in between since it didn't used too.
(Edit)
I wish I remembered the sites I read at the time; it was always a huge debate in the first person shooter communities especially Half Life and Counter-Strike. I ran a few dedicated Counter-Strike 1.x servers and we talked about it a lot; with some saying it doesn't matter past 30, 60, and some saying they notice a difference even between 140 and 120 frames per second. Human eyes are crazy things.
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Historically, video worked in "lines" and used to be interlaced. Hence, the HD standard named resolutions as "lines" and added "i" or "p". 720p, 1080i, 1080p. Nobody cared that 720p was 1280x720 and 1080p was 1980x1080. That's because on analog video the number of lines was fixed but the horizontal resolution was defined by the bandwidth of the (recording/transmission) system UP to a theoretical maximum.
Graphic resolutions are measured as an array of pixels and the longest dimension (the width) was selected for marketing monikers : 1K (1024x768), 2K (2048x1536), 4K (4096x3072), in 4:3 aspect ratio.
Somehow, when the DCI set about defining the resolutions for Digital Cinema, they decided to use the VESA widths (2048, 4096) and the broadcast heights (1080, 2160). This way they got an aspect ratio very close to the regular 35mm flat widescreen (1,89 is very close to 1,85) and easy conversion of broadcast material to Digital Cinema (just put very small pillars on the sides).
Graphic resolutions are measured as an array of pixels and the longest dimension (the width) was selected for marketing monikers : 1K (1024x768), 2K (2048x1536), 4K (4096x3072), in 4:3 aspect ratio.
Somehow, when the DCI set about defining the resolutions for Digital Cinema, they decided to use the VESA widths (2048, 4096) and the broadcast heights (1080, 2160). This way they got an aspect ratio very close to the regular 35mm flat widescreen (1,89 is very close to 1,85) and easy conversion of broadcast material to Digital Cinema (just put very small pillars on the sides).
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Another case of TV manufacturers trying to sell us features we don't need so they can keep prices high. Sadly for them, the added value to us keeps getting lower and lower. We just got switched over to "full HD" sets with 1080p, so 4k has quite a wait before consumers care about it.
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Why are consumer electronics companies trying to move away from the "4k" terminology to "Ultra HD"? For the same reason Apple calls their screens "Retina Displays" and not "326 Pixels Per Inch Displays."
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I predict 4K or ultra HD or whatever else it is called will never catch on. Very few people want their living rooms dominated by a monstrous screen. And even fewer people watch a movie and focus on the weave of the leading lady's knickers or the grain on the protagonist's leather sofa.
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