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Television Media

33 MegaPixel TV in 2015 240

Posted by CmdrTaco from the gonna-need-a-bigger-hard-drive dept.
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."
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33 MegaPixel TV in 2015 More

33 MegaPixel TV in 2015

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  • That's a lot of pixels (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14, 2008 @11:41AM (#22035836)
    Eye upgrades are expected to become available in 2016.

  • Humans have lost control of human development. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @11:44AM (#22035864) Homepage
    Technology is advancing far faster than the understanding humans have of themselves. I watch my NTSC 320 x 240 maximum resolution TV and usually feel that the resolution is higher than it needs to be considering that the low thought content of the TV show.
    • Here's an idea, why not try changing the channel? What's that... you only paid for basic channels. Here's a list of educational and also fun to watch programs I'd like to see someone try to rip apart:
      Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, The First 48, The Daily Show, etc...

      Things have changed since the A-Team and Knight Rider...

      • Are those shows actually better on a $1000 high-def flatscreen TV? Those shows are good because of good writing, good thinking, and charismatic presentation. As such, they're just as enjoyable on a 20 year old SD television...

        The only stuff that really benefits from an HD tv are sports and summer "blockbusters" like Transformers.

        P.S. The A-Team ruled.
      • Do you think any of those shows are really enhanced by the difference between SD and HD? Let alone 33 megapixels...

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )
          Do you think any of those shows are really enhanced by the difference between SD and HD? Let alone 33 megapixels...

          Short Answer: Yes
          Long Answer: I previously had a 27" TV. Even standard TV looked fine on it. Fast forward to today where I did my research and bought a 42" LCD. At those sizes the standard TV signal looks like crap when its stretched that big (yes even in 4:3 mode). However, watching HDTV is great... even non-sports related shows like Dirty Jobs. I really like seeing various animal fe
      • Mythbusters is fun as is Dirty Jobs. Educational maybe a little.
        The Daily Show? Fun if it matches your politics but frankly it is the Fox News for people that have a liberal bent. Of course I unusual in that I think any news source that contains a one liners is trash. If you want news listen to NPR, read a few news papers, and or watch the Sunday news shows like Meet the Press. If you just want to laugh and have your world view reinforced then the Daily Show is just fine.
        For educational TV I am still a big

    • Re:Humans have lost control of human development. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Monkey ( 795756 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @12:18PM (#22036412)
      That reminds me of when DVDs were the big new thing. Some one I know got me to set up his new DVD player, and later was bragging about how crisp his new DVD picture was and how great digital was. Half way through the movie I told him the sad truth. His DVD player didn't work so we were watching a VHS copy of the movie. He got sullen and cranky after that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _KiTA_ ( 241027 )

      Technology is advancing far faster than the understanding humans have of themselves.


      Some people [kurzweilai.net] have made a belief system(?) around that very notion.

      Hint: If he's right (and so far it appears he is), it's going to get a whole lot better (worse?).

  • Really? (Score:2, Funny)

    by east coast ( 590680 )
    This must be surreal in person

    If you think that is surreal you gotta try the acid. It'll blow your mind!

  • Not "surreal", exactly... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bohnanza ( 523456 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @11:50AM (#22035960)
    This must be surreal in person.

    I think the purpose for it is to seem real.

  • Duke Nuke Em is going to look amazing on it!

  • 3.5 TB for 18 minutes of video? (Score:3, Funny)

    by GodfatherofSoul ( 174979 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @11:56AM (#22036056)
    Too bad you'll need a Beowulf cluster of hard drives just to store a single movie.
    • Pitty you got marked as flamebait. You should have said "It will take a Beowulf cluster to watch Beowulf".
  • will i need a new graphics card for this display?

    why are you laughing?

  • We're halfway there (Score:5, Informative)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @11:56AM (#22036080)
    Well, we're halfway there already. I believe most studios that are now remastering for HD (especially HD DVD and Blu-Ray) are mastering the picture at 4K resolution: Blade Runner being one of those titles. The idea I guess is once "4K" becomes a standard, they'll have this content ready.

    Sony already sells a 4K projector [abelcine.com] meant for digital cinemas. But, you can use it to show 4 HD signals at once, something which Sony has been trying to promote to sportsbooks, tradeshows, etc.

    It all ultimately depends on visual acuity. Some people are already having trouble seeing the difference between an upscaled NTSC signal and an HD signal. I can only imagine this well get more troublesome as we keep ramping up the resolution.

    Just remember, HD doesn't even get close to properly displaying all of the resolution of 35mm film. We've got ways to go, although I don't see more than one new generation replacing the current HDTV "standard" for consumer-level high-end technology.
    • Well, we're halfway there already. I believe most studios that are now remastering for HD (especially HD DVD and Blu-Ray) are mastering the picture at 4K resolution: Blade Runner being one of those titles. The idea I guess is once "4K" becomes a standard, they'll have this content ready.

      I'm confused... George Lucas hasn't already re-released the original Star Wars Trilogy in 4K? He must be getting slow in his old age.

    • I am one of those people who has some difficulty distinguishing between upsampled DVD and true HD channels. I've seen some HD broadcast shows that look fairly poor (by which I mean stuff originally shot in HD), and some upsampled movies look better than HD.

      I myself am a pro photographer. I haven't shot a 35mm neg in years, but do still shoot medium and large format films. It all comes down to the source. A 35mm negative will enlarge acceptably well to ~24x36 reliably. I can do 24x36 inch gallery quali

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *

      HD doesn't even get close to properly displaying all of the resolution of 35mm film.

      That's true. But it's also very rare in real-world conditions to encounter a truly pristine presentation of a 35mm film. Maybe I have an exceptional bad group of theaters in my town, but my 1080p HDTV and a blu-ray or hd-dvd disc blows away most of the presentations I see in the theaters. Crappy worn prints, out-of-focus presentations, minimum wage "projectionists" who also pop the popcorn and sell tickets, cheap managers

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Eivind ( 15695 )
        It's actually -not- generally true. It may be true in some limited circumstances, depending on what you mean by "not even close".

        Excellent quality analog film, shot with a good lens, under good light-conditions, on a tripod, can capture up to about 20Mp, which is indeed significantly more than HD.

        But that's not the norm. In the average film there are less well-lit scenes, there are short exposures, there are higher-iso film, there are quick camera and subject-movements. Under such circumstances you're more
      • Your 1080p HDTV is probably not bigger than 60 inches, while in a theatre, the screen is 25 feet long. If you were to display a 1080p signal 25 feet across, it certainly will not look as good as a 35mm projection of the same size. Conversely, 35mm projected to 60 inches will absolutely look better than an HDTV signal.

  • Just in time (Score:3, Funny)

    by 192939495969798999 ( 58312 ) <info AT devinmoore DOT com> on Monday January 14, 2008 @12:11PM (#22036298) Homepage Journal
    Sounds like it will be just in time for when:
    1) I finally upgrade to "regular" HDTV...doh!
    2) George Lucas' re-re-release of Star Wars original trilogy in this crazy new format
    3) playing some Duke Nukem Forever on my PS9

  • Ridiculous given viewing distances and screen size (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StandardCell ( 589682 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @12:16PM (#22036378)
    One of the things that TV manufacturers contend with is what screen size versus resolution. The uptake of true 1080p on screen sizes of 32" or less has been slow because there's virtually no visual difference between 720p/WXGA screens at those screen sizes for the average viewing distance in a living room. I'm also not talking about computer output, though you wouldn't be able to read much unless you bumped the font size up by quite a bit at 1080p.

    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.
    • "Now, 37" is marginal and 42" is where it really starts getting to be noticeable"

      You, Sir, have obviously never watched terrestrial HD TV on a 24" Intel iMac... 1920x1080, 16.37 Mbps, 29.97 fps DD5.1, 48 kHz, 384 kbps.

      And while you position yourself as an expert, your time in the supposed lab is perhaps restricting your view of technology overall, where video is one of the drivers. Increased video performance drives faster pipes, increased storage, more efficient processors and improved displays which
      • Currently I have a Dell Inspiron 6000. It's display is a 15.4" Widescreen with a resolution of 1920x1200 (which for some reason they no longer offer). I have the desktop and all applications running at maximum resolution and I notice very easily the difference on a screen with just under a quarter of my 32" Widescreen Samsung TV. And that only runs on 720p. The difference isn't noticeable because there really isn't any media available for all the resolution on my laptop (perhaps I could get a Blu-ray pl
    • Paul Allen's music museum has an LED TV screen along one wall which must be at least 50-feet tall. It uses LED quads red-blue-green-white to light-up pixels. I recall it as about 1000 by 700 pixels - pretty much medium standard HD-TV. If the resolution increased an order of magnitude in each direction, it would be even more fantastic.

      I was looking for a web page describing this screen, but couldnt find it.

    • I'm also not talking about computer output, though you wouldn't be able to read much unless you bumped the font size up by quite a bit at 1080p.
      What? My monitor is a mere 20 diagonal visible inches (a Trinitron 500PS) and it runs at 1600X1200, which is about as many pixels as 1080p. At that pixel density, default font sizes look great and are very easy to read.

    • 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!.

      That's only because the TV is so deep. you can get a king size box spring into most homes, so certainly if the televisions were not unnecessarily thick they would fit into the homes.

      Both SED and the laser-based DLP televisions promise to greatly reduce the depth of the system, more or less eliminating this problem.

      For my part, I prefer front projection, because of its versatility. I have a true XGA resolution projector with 1800 lumens coming, it's only $550 (but it's also LCD with 800:1 contrast, which

  • Now that's high-resolution. Hmm, 33 MPix hentai...

    I think it's overkill. The vast majority of us don't have that kind of room, bandwidth, money, and vision to benefit from this.
  • Wow, they're actually throwing 300 million yen ($3 million) at this project? They must really be serious about it. Is that just the bureaucratic overhead for the planning commission, or the whole R&D budget? I'm pretty sure we've spent more than that in the US warning people that their old analog TVs will stop working when we switch over to HDTV.

  • Diminishing Returns (Score:4, Insightful)

    by torkus ( 1133985 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @12:18PM (#22036424)
    Impressive, but diminishing returns will relegate this to...well i have no idea what scientific la la la will make use.

    "low def" to 480p (huge improvement)
    480p -> -> -> 1080i (noticable improvement with proper equipment)
    1080i -> wtfpwnedx1000 will be a minor improvement useful only for those with the equipment, a huge screen, etc.

    Looking at cost...it scales extremely quickly but i guess the ferrari isn't $995,000 faster than the Scion either.

    Though...somewhere around this level of resolution you make a "virtual window" available to apartments with no exterior walls. But hey, if you can afford a 3 bagillion $ TV for a window you can probably get a nicer apartment :)
    • Costs do go down too though. Last summer I bought a 1080p projector for 1/12th the cost of the cheapest model two or three years ago. I think they're a little cheaper still now, but really, once the display elements ramp up in production, the costs can go way down to something that's getting to be affordable.

      And the picture quality jump is more than just noticeable. I think 480p to 720p is quite noticeable even on crap equipment.

      But I see an odd dichotomy, a crowd like Slashdot's readers as a whole doesn

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by torkus ( 1133985 )
        Yes, costs go down over time as well but you add significantly to the "available" time frame for something to become commonplace. I wouldn't mind an unlimited definition TV for the heck of it, but it's just the next level of 8-track -> tape -> CD -> HD CD/DAT. Eventually the incremental benefit isn't worth the cost of replacing equipment/infrastructure. At that point, innovation turns elsewhere to address some other aspect and the hardcore critics buy $8000 wires for their speakers :)

        Oh, and as

  • I've seen this live and related industry talks (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hairy Fop ( 48404 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @12:20PM (#22036458) Homepage
    I saw them demo this live a couple of years ago. It's very impressive, but despite the post title they're not thinking about using it for domestic use any time soon, it's aimed at digital cinema and outdoor events and won't be commercially available till about 2025. What they are proposing is the standard to be ratified by 2015.
    This was the same company that demo'd HD TV in the early 80s and people thought it was at least 10 years away from being commercially available, they misjudged by over 10 years. They know their technology but not their lead times. Like most companies in this sector.

  • Saw it last year at IBC in Amsterdam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SilentTristero ( 99253 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @12:22PM (#22036472)
    ... and it was totally amazing. Like looking out a huge picture window. They had some stored content (playing off a fast RAID array I believe) and some streaming content from a camera array mounted on the roof. The projector alignment tech was awesome; there were no visible seams anywhere. This was in a room basically the same size as the one on the linked web site; maybe 50' x 30'; viewing distance around 10-20'. It was beautiful.

    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.

  • At 100 ppi that's an 88.1-inch display (Score:3, Informative)

    by HTH NE1 ( 675604 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @12:30PM (#22036588)
    This 7680x4320 is 1920*4x1080*4, or 16 times larger area than HD.

    sqrt( 7680^2 + 4320^2 = 58982400 + 18662400 = 77644800 ) = 8,811.62868 pixels diagonal

    At the typical 100 pixels per inch of computer LCDs today, that's an 88.1-inch display.

    I doubt I'd be using that in portrait mode.

    An an exercise, if "Frank's 2000-inch TV" is a 16x9 display at 100 ppi, what's the resolution? Given that most >HD resolutions are an integer multiple of 1920x1080, which is the nearest probable x*HD resolution?
  • There was a recent article about the cost of maintaining digital film as well as the tailings of production, versus real film. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/26/1727237 [slashdot.org] One of the earlier comments suggested that digital cinema is currenty using 2K projectors (2048 pixels wide), which would effectively be 3.1 MP. If we're going to 33 MP video then, the quote from the other article of $208,569 being the annual cost of preserving a digital movie would be multiplied by a factor of 10.5 (33

  • Best line from TFA: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zak3056 ( 69287 ) on Monday January 14, 2008 @01:52PM (#22037666) Journal

    The image would be more palpable and vibrant than anything we can imagine.

    It must be sad to have such a poor imagination--or, worse yet, to think that a picture of something, no matter the resolution, could somehow look "better" than the real thing.

  • 24 speakers? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by somasynth ( 1088691 )
    At some point the industry may realize it would be better to use binaural technology instead. Hopefully this can happen before I'm required to position 5000 speakers.
  • Although it would be great to have a home theater or a sport's stadium with all this technology, I see the most benefit going to hospitals and research buildings. It would lead to great detail of the area they are examining, scanning or performing surgery on.

    Just don't imagine a doctor performing a colonoscopy and watching it on the this kind of screen.

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