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."

Re:What display?

[suitepotato]

A laser based device would be the easiest and best choice. We do have the ability to direct lasers with extreme precision and excellent accurate repeatability. However, you might want to clear away an entire wall of one room, do it over in silvered white paint, and forget about using a cone of space starting at the projector and going across the room spreading to the whole wall. Now you have a real good reason to get going on remodelling the basement to make a TV room.

HDTV has been obsolete since day 1

[dada21]

HDTV is old news and an antiquated format. It was a government standard based on OTA standards.

Tomorrow's receivers will be much faster (a la XPMCE or MythTV). OTA is dead, we want IPTV. 7.2 surround is ready. 2.35:1 is required, at a resolution of 3392 x 1440, progressive.

We want fixed 6500K color standard, with no flesh-push or blue-push. We want an adaptable decoding processor, not something stuck in one mode.

HDTV isnt the future. A PC, Gnutella, and a HD2 projector is.

Compression?

[TommydCat]

What's the point if any service that feeds video to you compresses the crap out of it?

I've got a hddirectivo, but the compression is fairly obvious when compared to OTA broadcasts, and even those are easy to pick out artifacts.

I don't see any huge leaps in bandwidth from any provider Real Soon Now, and wouldn't any compression to fit the available bandwidth reduce the effective resolution?

However if this is for closed-circuit feed from Hugh Hefner's humble abode, I may be interested :)

Re:Per hour

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's assume that video content can be compressed by 2000x in 10 years time. Currently H.264 can get a compression ratio of 1200:1 (http://www.shapeofdays.com/h264/ [shapeofdays.com] bottom) so this might not be too far out.

21TB -> compression -> 11GB.

Even if we decide that 2000:1 compression ratio is really taking it too far, a 500:1 compression ration would still give us a movie that would fit on next year's dual-layer Bluray disc. A 250:1 compression ratio will require a 4 layer disc however.

Re:Random thought

[Punboy]

For this I am assuming 1cmx1cmx5mm for the size of Samsung's 16Gbit flash chip. This is probably slightly larger, but we must include the board on which they are soldered

People made do with huge VHS tapes for years, right?

So lets see how much storage we can cram into a VHS tape using flash.

first lets gets the area of a VHS tape... 7 3/8 x 4 1/16 x 1. Thats in inches. So, lets use Google to calculate that into cubic centimeters.
Thats about 491 Cubic centimeters.

Now lets see how many cubic centimeters a single flash chip is.
Thats 0.5 cubic centimeters. Now lets divide 491 by 0.5.
Thats a whopping 982 flash chips!

Now, how many gigabits of storage is that?
15,712 Gigabits of storage space in a single VHS tape filled with 16Gbit flash. Wow. What is that in GB?
1,964 gigabytes

Ok, so we'd need 10 of those for a 2-hour movie. But you have to remember, thats uncompressed. If we compress it, we just may get a single movie into a 1,964GB flassette (flash-cassette, something i just made up).

Woot.

Re:That's a bit of an overstatment...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

In the U.S., maybe. You may be interested in looking at the stats of households that have plasma flat screen HDTV units in Japan. They're selling like crazy. I don't have one, but all my co-workers do. Supposedly the entire terrestrial broadcasting system is going digital in 2007 in Japan. THat is, analog broadcasts end. Digital is already here, and a lot of it is HDTV.

Considering the way Japanese consumerism goes (buy, use, trash, buy again) by the time this S-HDTV goes consumer level, I'm sure it'll sell. Even in the U.S., once the prices go low enough. Think about it. How many places still sell (or even make) B&W TVs? When your TV dies and no one sells analog non-HDTV units, you don't really have a choice other than giving up TV altogether. Which, by the way, doesn't sound like such a bad idea. My TV is used primarily for watching movies, and not for receiving TV signals. I already have an LCD projector, and I'm wondering if it isn't time to chuck the TV for once and for all.

Re:Obsolete? Hardly.

[timeOday]

You raise an interesting issue... will our new video standards last for 50 years like the first ones did?

IMHO, they will not... I think we'll see more frequent improvements. First generation equipment was all implemented in hardware with a certain number of scan lines, refresh rate, color fidelity, and encoding scheme, yet downloaded videos vary in ALL of these parameters. From the early postage-stamp animated gifs, to video clip mpg, to VCD, SVCD, xVid, and now full DVD rips seem to be catching on. And even HDTV features not 1 but 3 different resolutions, which is a step in the right direction for special-purpose TV hardware.

Re:HDTV has been obsolete since day 1

[MichaelSmith]

HDTV isnt the future. A PC, Gnutella, and a HD2 projector is.

Yep. There are too many layers in these TV specifications. What field are they in? Video or communications? There will be a need for ultra high res video in the future, but TV is dying.

Every evening TV competes with /. for my time, and mostly loses. And I am not one of those who exhaust themselves on World of Warcraft until 3am then stagger into the office and pretend to work.

The Broadcasting model came out of the basic physics of radio transmission. We are not limited by that anymore, so broadcasting is out.

Re:What display?

[fiber0pti]

This might work: http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/vizcor. htm [sandia.gov]

I saw this thing in person. It's amazing.

Re: Oops - and I meant to say...

[Munta]

5 good reason why this can only be good for HDTV

1 - The Maximum resolution of a standard 42in HDTV is 45 pixels an inch. Imagine 184 pixels an inch. Or a 168 inch wide screen!
2 - With a 168 inch screen you could display your TV, your Email, your PC, your CCTV and still have room for more on one screen
3 - A whole wall showing a hi resolution immersive environmental picture
4 - Technological advance that companies will develop for to fill the first 3 points
5 - Advance of super HDTV will lower the price of "standard HDTV" to the masses.

Any advance like this one can only further the true dream of an immersive information/mood/entertainment environment. Imagine developing software when all four walls of your office are your note pad!

I see this as helping HDTV adoption as it provides so many more oportunities for its use.

Re:Per hour

[NanoGator]

"Thats 21TB for a standard-length movie! ~21,000GB! Foly Huck!"

I remember thinking 'Foly Huck!' when talk of CD-ROMs were holding 650 meg of data. Back then a big hard drive was a whopping 40 megs. Now I think CDs are so miniscule. I'm guessing in a decade or so 21 terrabytes will be like what a gig is today. Not that I did any real math to arrive at that conclusion, but man, as the years go by, it's amazing what storage capacities turn into.

In any event, that's uncompressed. With compression (which is quite inevitable) that'll drop anywhere from 10:1 to 100:1. In the extreme case, 210GB doesn't sound so bad. 5 years from now or so we'll have HDs that'll handle that fairly easily.

Re:A bit more info and obvious first application

[PopCR]

You gotta remember that the decision to shoot movies at 24 fps is an artistic one. If you go higher than that then what you're watching stops being entertainement and something more like real life. Have you ever watched any of those European PAL 60 fps shows? They're just way too real to be enjoyed. Reality needs to be abstracted in order for it to be entertaining. Here's another example: have you ever watched a documentary of a movie being made or something along those lines? You know, a 30 or 60 fps film showing the director shooting a scence for a 24 fps movie. That scene looks totally boring and hyperrealistic when seen at 30 or 60 fps, but all of a sudden when it comes out in the movie theaters at 24 fps it comes alive. Why haven't painters everywhere been replaced by photographers? Because people are bored of reality. They want something interesting to look at. They want art, dammit. That's what movies are - art.

Re:A bit more info and obvious first application

[NanoGator]

"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."

I think I read somewhere that some IMAX movies run at 60FPS, for that very reason. But I have to wonder if higher frame rates were available in films, would dramas use them? I mean, TV is capable of doing 60FPS. (50 in Europe) Yet they halve that for shows like M*A*S*H and X-Files. Whereas, shows like That 70's show do the full interlacing trick. The higher frame rate is nicer in some ways, but it has a way of dampening the drama of a shot. Example: I mentioned That 70's Show. It had a fair bit of light hearted drama in it. There was a recap show that went on about the previous season, I think it had to do with Eric and Donna breaking up. For the clips show, they lowered the frame rate. (No idea why, but they did.) That scene, which I remember as being rather light hearted when it originally aired, looked a lot more dramatic in the clip show due to the lower frame rate. It was more like watching important events in the past than watching something taking place right now.

My point? If shows are intentionally being made today with lower frame rates, then doesn't it stand to reason that the 24FPS standard will probably be used in movies like Star Wars? I'd like to say yes more definitively, but I really can't back that up with a director's quote or anything like that.

works great for me...

[YesIAmAScript]

I hear these stories and I am rather surprised.

I have an antenna in my attic, and I pick up 8 UHF stations from 40 miles away perfectly. This is IMPOSSIBLE with analog. They break up maybe once every couple hours. If I look at the analog versions, they're very snowy and ghosty all the time.

I know digital goes abruptly from great to nothing, but in my experience, it is still great when analog is so ugly as to be bothersome.

As to digital TV being obsolete when it started out, it's just not true. You were never going to get HDTV over analog, giving over 5 channel slots to a single channel wasn't an option. So digital brings you HDTV and analog does not. That's a huge advantage.

Are you perhaps in a country that uses other than ATSC TV (the US uses ATSC over 8VSB for over-the-air reception, I hear ATSC over CODFM is even better)?

I know 8VSB is sensitive to multipath, it's a bit annoying. Getting a directional antenna should fix this for you though. The path to the transmitter I am pointing at has 1500+ft mountain ranges running parallel to it, so I figure I'm a pretty bad case for multipath and it works great for me.

Wait, I'm curious....

[Khyber]

Some doctors I've recently talked to say that the approximate resolution of the human eye is about 14 megapixels.... so... As with many new technologies, the p0rn industry will probably be the first to deploy this 33,177,600 pixel technology. I'm wondering just how sharply we (our eyes) will perceive this 33 megapixel technology???

BTW, for the math nitpicks, 7680 x 4320 equals out to 33,955,200 pixels, not 33,177,600.

Re:A bit more info and obvious first application

[blincoln]

why only use 24bit true colour when your going for this quality?

Yeah, this is stupid.

I would take HD resolution with an improved colour model over this any day.