33 MegaPixel TV in 2015 240
psyph3r writes "The Japanese communications ministry is investing in a new broadcast display technology with NHK to launch a 33 million pixel, 24-point surround-sound broadcast standard by 2015. The standard will use a video data rate of 24Gbps and an audio data rate of 28Mbps. This must be surreal in person."
Soon you will be able to SEE reality... (Score:1, Interesting)
Last year (Score:1, Interesting)
SD: yuch
1080p: oh, that's nice
4k: wow, that's fantastic
8K: holy shit, that's like looking out the window
Re:What this could mean for SpanktraVision (Score:3, Interesting)
Ridiculous given viewing distances and screen size (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, 37" is marginal and 42" is where it really starts getting to be noticeable. This is also the sweet spot for a primary panel for the next few years. Beyond this resolution, you'll start noticing 1080p from the next highest resolution (i.e. quad-720p or 1440p) at the 56-63" screen size. But there's one problem with 63" and larger screens: they are close to the limit for what most homes can pass through their door!. In fact, a monolithic 71" 1080p plasma that a large Korean company allowed us to borrow for our lab work wouldn't go properly around normal corners and with standard door widths. So all your dreams of 102" LCDs in your living rooms may be short lived given you won't be able to get it around any corners. Most luxury homes these days, by the way, usually have this in mind when the house is architected so that there's enough room to get these sets into the house from outside. Also, bear in mind that the scaling technology, although advancing rapidly, can only do so much with standard definition material and it just looks worse as you get a larger screen size.
Now, even if it's possible to build a seamless, high-reliability large screen like a flexible screen that can fit in your room, you start hitting a visual limit again at around quad-1080p (3840x2160) for the height of an average room in most of the developed world without even considering how much eye/neck strain this will cause for the average viewer. In case you weren't counting already, we're at around ~8 Megapixels at that size. So, having an 8k x 4k resolution system like the one proposed will require a double size wall which - surprise! - is pretty much where most theaters are going for online distribution of movies. Heck, they already get away with 4k x 2k resolution in digital theaters anyway and most people don't even notice it. And when I saw their demo of 4k, my entire field of view needed to be taken up to see any differences.
As for the audio, never mind that 24 position audio is completely impractical from an installation perspective in the average home and can be easily emulated using far fewer speakers and using virtual surround positioning techniques. This is why it's funny when DTS versus DTS-HD gets brought up - unless you're an audiophile or are in a movie theater, you probably won't care about or notice the difference.
And this gets us back to one immutable point - that this technology is complete overkill for broadcast applications. If broadcast is the target market, and given the rise of personalized on-demand/online video, then this an essentially completely futile effort.
Saw it last year at IBC in Amsterdam (Score:5, Interesting)
But, they could only run it about 10 minutes per hour. Not sure whether it was heat, storage, or whatever, but it was definitely not at all ready for prime time. Still, when it worked it was just stunningly gorgeous.
Re:Max Resolution? (Score:3, Interesting)
Modern displays have decent color, but as long as we are limiting ourselves to red / green / blue color sources, this will always be distinguishable from real (real cyan is not a 50/50 mixture of blue and green light, it is a single wavelength between the two).
Dynamic range is how bright the brightest areas are and how dark the darkest areas are. Real dynamic range would show the sun so bright on the screen that it hurt your eyes to look at, with dark areas so dark that your eyes would not be able to see the detail even if the screen had no bright areas (but that detail would still be present).
And of course no matter what, as long as it is projected onto a single flat surface, it is 2D, and it will always look like a movie.
As for pixel count, many people are already unable to distinguish between standard definition and high definition when viewing at a standard viewing distance (of course different screen sizes have a different standard viewing distance). Of course in the TV store you can't get 8-12 feet away from the screen so when you're shopping, the differences seem obvious.
Cost of preservation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
My father just purchased a Sharp Aquios 52" HDTV before Christmas for their new house. I was there visiting and hated it. Why? Well, not just because I believe HDTV to be a pointless joke but b/c he didn't have an HD feed from his satellite provider. I asked, "why did you buy an HDTV when you don't have HD?" He said, "because it's bigger and my eyes aren't so good anymore."
For someone who used to be so in tune with technology and so on top of shit, I was surprised when he made this illogical reasoning. All that TV does now is over-distort an already distorted image and make it 52" wide. It's blurry as shit and obnoxious to watch unless you have a newer DVD in there. Older DVDs -- which he has more than a few -- look like ass on there because it won't upconvert them to anything near the 1080 it will do. Newer DVDs, like his copy of Ratatouille looked fine upconverted to 1080.
The only useful thing for HD is watching the NFL and I can do that for free at someone else's house or at the bar where I usually am on Sunday anyway since Minnesota still has fucking pointless Blue Laws and you can't buy anything except 3.2 in the stores.
Re:What this could mean for SpanktraVision (Score:4, Interesting)
The resulting conversation was designed to demonstrate that whichever film you couldn't stop watching was the one you "couldn't be with." Most everyone agreed that they tended to ignore the tamer (or familiar) scenes and found themselves staring at the strange.
I notice that my tastes in entertainment continue to change--and that we think we need bigger and sharper vidscreens. Compare and contrast to the technicians who create bigger/sharper/better vidscreens: I think they're in it more for the "we have the technology" angle.
Re:Max Resolution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, there's some refining to do to be sure, but the human eye is not a laboratory spectrometer. We have a finite number of types of color receptors that have their own sensitivity curves. You don't need to replicate every wavelength on the spectrum to replicate reality; you only need to stimulate the eye's color receptors to the same degree (and in the same ratios) that the reality does. That's why RGB displays work at all. Now, with current technology, and the current standards, RGB only covers a subset of the human-perceivable color space. But that's not to say it is impossible to do so with only a few color sources.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
Which has nothing to do with the age of the DVD or inability to upconvert, but is more an issue that early DVDs were encoded at lower then desirable bitrates. (Okay, some of the early encoders weren't the best either.) But even back in 96/97/98 (?) there were DVDs released as "SuperBit" releases where they trimmed ads and extras off the disk and gave it a higher bitrate.
There also may have been a few DVDs that were encoded as half-frames (360x480 a.k.a. half-D1?) instead of full-frame (720x480).
Data-bloat: DRM of the future! (Score:1, Interesting)