NHK Working To Make HDTV Obsolete

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at EEtimes.com Japanese company NHK has successfully demonstrated a live relay of 'Super Hi-Vision' television, which is 16x 1080i resolution -- 7680 x 4320!" From the article: "NHK developed a Super Hi-Vision camera equipped with 8 megapixel CCD image sensors that can take 4k x 8k images. In the field test, it sent the two cameras to a sea park and sent baseband signals without image compression using an fiberoptic network formed by multiple network companies. The signal of the total 24 gigabits per second was divided into 161.5 Gbps HD-SDI signals to sent using the DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplex) method."

That's a bit of an overstatment...

[Kjella]

Resolution doesn't make sense unless you can see it. HDTV adoption is slow at best, and consumers aren't going to move to a better format than that for many many decades. This format might be interesting for cinemas and such, but it's not significant to HDTV at all.

16x 1080i What??

[mpapet]

In typical slashdot byline fashion: Is this the end of HDTV? Tune in and see!

The two places it would be great are:
-Digital cinema. It might keep the movie theaters open a few more years. On the production side: Talk about a storage problem when you have to store all of the raw footage!
-"jumbotron" type displays for arena-style live events.

OK, cool.. but...

[loraksus]

1080i transport streams run about 5 gigs for 40 minutes and require a ~2Ghz processor to decode without dropping any frames or choppiness. I know 2Ghz isn't considered too fast - even now, but I am finding the trend to require an insanely fast machine to watch / record tv sightly odd. Without someone out there to create a unit out there that makes it easy to view HD content - and by easy, I mean "dear old mom and dad" easy, I'm worried that people won't adopt it and choose to just stick with plain jane devices (which won't drop the price on the cool stuff for us)
There really isn't a lot of really great HDTV compatible stuff out there either. DirectTV is dragging their feet and the rest of the major players out there aren't exactly pushing anything terrible innovative either. Software for it is also pretty bad. I know a lot of people like MythTv, etc, but it could be a lot better.
There really isn't a efficient way to compress any 1080 streams either - you need loads of time, a fair bit of ram and a great machine - even then a 250gig drive fills up really quickly.

Also, and this is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine - is that with 1080i (and 720p), you can see if the camera isn't focused perfectly. I find this incredibly annoying. If the quality gets bumped up another couple of levels, this will be more noticable. I'm guessing this will be corrected as more and more people realize that it looks sloppy on the cameraman's part.

If you're bored, try and figure out storage requirements for the folks who film your favorite shows in 24p (BSG does, as well as a bunch of other shows) and then figure out the storage requirements for something recorded in this format ;)

And yet...

[Evil Butters]

And yet, there will still only be 3-4 programs on TV/cable/satellite actually worth watching -- no matter what the resolution is!

95meg frame buffer

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming it is only 24bit. 32bit would be 127megs. With a back buffer, front buffer, and z buffer it would be 380megs. With a 16bit per channel floating point back buffer it would be 506.25 megs for frame buffers!

With a 512meg video card you'd have 5megs left for your textures.

Give me 1080p and I'll be satisfied for now.

Re:A bit more info and obvious first application

[diablomonic]

What is annoying to me is that even with all those pixels, which is coming close to enough to properly completely trick the eye (some people estimate that the eye can see somewhere round 5000 by 10000 "pixels" accross our full field of view, maybe more for some people), they have left it as ~25 frames a second (~32,000,000 pixels * 3 bytes of info per pixel (but why only use 24bit true colour when your going for this quality?) is roughly 96 MB per frame, and the uncompressed total was ~2.5 GB per second, which is roughly 25 frames a second.

I realise that they most likely did this becouse it would be damn hard to get any higher with that amount of data per frame, but still, if your someone who is designing a spec and aiming for a new super dooper standard, PLEASE UP THE FRAME RATE. 25 FPS SUCKS for fast action.

also, anyone who is going to argue with this and say 25 is all you need, please read and understand this before hand, or else shut up: www.100fps.com [100fps.com]

Re:A bit more info and obvious first application

[connorbd]

There's no other practical use for it but movie theatres. The bandwidth demands are obscene -- you couldn't broadcast with it, and you'd need to run it over fiber rather than coax for cable TV. Not to mention that a minimally sized UHDV set would take up most of a wall.

In the next decade? No way.

[rnhg]

The idea that this technology will be embraced in the next decade is rather optimistic, to say the least. Look at the history of HD. Sony demonstrated the technology in the 1980's. The US adopted an alternative digital standard in the early 1990's with conversion mandated to be complete by 2001. We are now in 2005, and we don't even have a frickin' recording format, let alone standardized broadcast! Sometime next year, the first recording formats will emerge, with a lot of blood on the floor (pick sides: Sony or Toshiba) and the studios will continue to push DVD's. Why? Because well over 70% of studio revenue comes from DVD sales. Movie box office accounts for less than a third of the cash they get from movies, and if you think the studios are moving away from DVD, think again! they like money.