Super Hi-Vision TV, HDTV Will Be Dead

[David P. Hill]

http://stevesblogen.i2mfan.com/2007/04/12/hdtv-is-dead-long-live-super-hi-vision-tv/

HDTV is dead, Long live Super Hi-Vision TV
…in 2025!

We just started to get HDTV in homes that they started talking about the next generation. A current HDTV has a maximum resolution 1920×1080 but Super Hi-Vision TV will be 4 times better at 7680×4320. Now, that’s details!

Don’t worry, it will not be until 2015 that the first test will be done.

“As part of its preparation for its bid for the 2016 Olympics Game in Tokyo, Japan will carry out test broadcasting in Super Hi-vision in 2015, and the nation is expected to have super hi-vision broadcasting within a decade from then. ”

http://www.engadget.com/2005/11/05/nhk-shows-off-some-live-7680-x-4320-super-hi-vision-tv-in/

NHK shows off some live 7680 x 4320 "Super Hi-Vision" TV in Japan
Posted Nov 5th 2005 3:30PM by Paul Miller
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

This is totally not replacing HDTV for a good million years or so, but NHK of Japan has demoed some "Super Hi-Vision" TV running at 7680 x 4320 — 16 times the resolution of that lame old 1080i your grandparents are talking about. The demo involved a live feed from a couple of custom built cameras based around 8 megapixel CCDs, with their 24Gbps signal being chopped into 16 HD signals and sent 161 miles over a fiber optic network to the the demo site at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi Japan. So the good news is that they can rock the live TV with this technology, but the gooder news is that this isn't even out of the labs yet, so that brand spanking new HDTV of yours won't be going out of style anytime soon.

[Vidiot]

Almost all major Hollywood films (like all the summer blockbusters) are being edited, scanned, mastered, and printed to film as 4K digital files. Super Hi-Vision was demoed at NAB this past April in Las Vegas, and most industry people I know all yawned. It's an unwieldly, unreasonable format that is impractical for many reasons. 4K is bad enough as it is.

I think you can make a comparison to mastering albums at 192KHz, 36-bits. Is that really necessary?

[Pinknik]

Welcome vidiot. Well, I think they are already starting to streamline the process some, and working on making 4K digital cameras that will eventually operate like film cameras. Could be a good origination format for major motion pictures as it becomes more wieldy.

[full moon]

There will also be a robot to get your drinks..

[andrewz]

Atleast people are trying to always create something better!

[Vidiot]

I think they are already starting to streamline the process some, and working on making 4K digital cameras that will eventually operate like film cameras.
35mm negative already has more than 4K resolution, depending on how you measure it. The digital pickups' biggest problems are a terrible sensitivity to overload, lack of dynamic range (compared to film), and an enormous file size. You're looking at 52 megs per frame for 4K capture. It's a formidable task to find drives fast enough to keep up with doing that 24 frames per seconds, 12-14 hours a day. If I did my math right, that's 74 gigs a minute, 4 terabytes an hour. Tons of material.

If you shoot for many weeks (typically 3-4 months for a Hollywood blockbuster), you're looking at Petabytes of storage. They ran into enormous storage problems recently on David Fincher's Zodiac, one of the very first films shoot in 2K and captured digitally on hard drive. And the storage for 2K is only 1/4 what it is for 4K -- 13 megs a frame, which is almost manageable.

Shooting on film makes much far sense right now from an economic and storage point of view, plus most cinematographers and studios believe the picture quality is better on film. I think there will be a gradual transition to shooting digitally, but it's not going to happen as quickly as some people think.

[John B Good]

Atleast people are trying to always create something better!

Or at least, trying to make something that will get them the money, instead of the other guys.

[I Am The Lolrus]

won't happen. Telecoms can't even do normal HD, they can't do sub HD, etc... they will never do anything close to that unless they charge 1000 bucks a month for television because they are so greedy. Maybe in japan/south korea, not in the states.

[Lord Hawthorne]

I hope it will be backward-compatible with what's new now. I'm the kind of guy who keeps a TV for 20 years or so.

[nosticker]

Not to threadcrap, but even this new format will be compressed and destroyed by cable/DSS companies. I saw an HD golf game on NBC this weekend that looked as bad as or worse than digital cable. It's outrageous what they do to video.

Still, in the future, perhaps it might look good off of a HDD or disc format.




Dan

[shokhead]

HDTV,Super duper tv,7.1,15.2. I just cant afford it anymore so i'll stick with 5.1 and reg tv.

[John B Good]

Excerpt from the linked article, one of those ‘technology bites’ pieces, pointing out that the cult of innovation is filled with dead ends.

“Edgerton calls the tendency to overrate the impact of dramatic new technologies “futurism.” Few things, it turns out, are as passé as past futures. In the mid-twentieth century, a world was promised in which nuclear power would provide electricity “too cheap to meter,” eliminating pollution, forestalling energy crises, and alleviating world poverty; hypersonic civil air travel would whip masses of us around the globe in an hour or two; permanent settlements would be established not just on the moon but on the planets; nuclear weapons would put an end to war.
And so it goes. The “paperless office” was celebrated as long ago as 1975, in Business Week, but since then we’ve had avalanches of the stuff: global consumption of paper has tripled in the past three decades, and the average American worker now goes through twelve thousand sheets of paper every year. In 1987, Ronald Reagan announced that high-temperature superconductor technology would “bring us to the threshold of a new age,” but commercializing that technology has proved much more difficult than the original hype suggested. In 2000, Bill Clinton speculated that, as a direct result of the Human Genome Project, “our children’s children will know the term ‘cancer’ only as a constellation of stars.” (That would be nice, if only because it would indicate an improved knowledge of astronomy.) Predictions like these don’t inspire great confidence in the utopian futures now being spun around stem-cell research or nanotechnology.”

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/05/14/070514crbo_books_shapin?currentPage=all

[seriousfun]

...

I think you can make a comparison to mastering albums at 192KHz, 36-bits. Is that really necessary?

There are some parallels between audible and visual art and commerce, but they happen with different timelines.

Home video, starting with TV in the '30s, was always way behind a good film presentation. I think you and I would agree that this is still the situation. But as digital acquisition becomes better (the storage issue is a a detail, that, and distribution bandwidth, will continue to become bigger and cheaper), home video will eventually catch up with the best of film presentation. We are already at the first major milestone, where TV shows are being acquired at 1020p and we can view them identically at home.

Home audio reached this point years ago. Most would agree that a CD, properly done, can deliver an identical copy of a studio original recording, and this has been the case for decades. I believe that we should acquire music recordings at the highest resolution available to us and then conform them to standards for delivery, whether it's CD, LP, or a digital file, but all of these media can deliver stunning music to the home.