[QuadList] OT throw our your flatscreen! 4k is on the way?

[COURYHOUSE at aol.com]

_http://naob-advocacy.informz.net/naob-advocacy/archives/archive_2480593.htm
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(http://naob-advocacy.informz.net/naob-advocacy/archives/archive_2480593.html) 
 
     


Higher Definition  Television is On the Way


Years ago, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was held in both  January 
and June. Since the late 1990's, it's just been a winter  show, but for the 
past several years, in June, CEA hosts the CEA  Line Shows in New York, where 
new consumer products can be featured  mid-year. At this year's event, 
Westinghouse Digital showed its  model D55QX1, a 55-inch consumer TV featuring 
"4K" resolution of  3,840 pixels (H) X 2,160 pixels (V), planned to be 
released in the  first quarter of 2013. LG, Sharp and Toshiba had previously shown 
4K  TV sets at the 2012 CES. Toshiba's 55-inch 4K set was set to debut  in 
Japan late in 2012 (at an expected price of $12,000) but it is  not expected 
to be available in the U.S. until 2013. Nonetheless, 4K  TV is clearly real 
and starting its introductory launch in the  not-too-far future.  
Industry interest in 4K is growing. In early June, the Consumer  
Electronics Association announced the formation of a 4K Working  Group, to act as a 
forum for interested parties, including  broadcasters, to define 4K 
technology, discuss content options and  educate consumers about 4K. The first meeting 
of the main 4K Working  Group was held in early July, and was well attended 
by a broad  cross-section of the television industry. One of the subgroups, 
 chaired by Bryan Burns, vice president of strategic business  planning at 
ESPN, will be discussing content options and is  interested in the views of 
broadcasters and others on business  strategy and planning with respect to 
the opportunities in 4K TV.  Their first meeting will be held by conference 
call on Thursday July  12. Those interested in participating in these 
discussions should  contact Kinsey Fabrizio at CEA at _kfabrizio at ce.org_ 
(mailto:kfabrizio at ce.org) .  
The benefits of the higher resolution of 4K (as with HDTV) are  dependent 
on viewing distance and screen size. With 4K though, at  typical viewing 
distances (such as the often quoted Lechner distance  of 9 feet) the minimum 
screen size to appreciate the higher  resolution starts to get rather large. 
Given normal 20/20 visual  acuity, humans can resolve objects with a subtended 
angle as small  as one arcminute (1/60th of a degree). Applying that 
criteria to  screens with different sizes and pixel count resolutions can yield  
the relationship between maximum viewing distances for various sized  
screens. A nicely produced graphic showing these relationships is  available at 
carltonbale.com and is reproduced  below:
    


Note that the full benefit  of 4K TV at the 9 foot Lechner distance would 
require a screen  diagonal in excess of 140 inches, whereas for HDTV a screen 
diagonal  of about 70" will suffice. 




As it turns out, the subject of resolution, as a proxy for the  subjective 
judgment of realness or sense of being there, is more  complicated than can 
be depicted in a simple graph. For an in-depth  treatment of the history of 
"high definition" and all the relevant  factors in evaluating high 
resolution imagery, take a look at Mark  Schubin's paper "_Why 4K: Vision and 
Television_ 
(http://naob-advocacy.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT0yNDgwNTkzJnA9MSZ1PTAmbGk9MTIzNTQyMTE/index.html) "  presented in May 2012 at the 2012 Spring 
Technical Forum of  CableLabs-NCTA-SCTE.  
4K source material exists now for consumers to view in movie  theater 
settings, but getting 4K into to the home environment is  just at the beginning 
stages. Version 1.4 of the HDMI specification  includes support for 4K, and 
the Sony BDP-S790 Blu Ray player, at an  MSRP of just over $200, will upscale 
HD content to 4K resolution.  Broadcasters' thoughts, however, turn quickly 
to the challenges of  transmission requirements. After all, 4K content has 
four times the  number of pixels as HDTV, and the 19 MB/s data capacity 
available in  the ATSC DTV Standard is clearly insufficient, given the 
limitations  of MPEG-2 compression. But newer compression schemes may change  that. 
In particular, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), now in the  final stages 
of standardization by the ITU-T \ ISO/IEC Joint  Collaborative Team on Video 
Coding (JCT-VC), could be the  compression engine that makes 4K 
transmission over-the-air feasible,  at least technically. At the 2012 NAB Broadcast 
Engineering  Conference, for example, Matthew Goldman from Ericsson presented 
a  paper called "High Efficiency Video Coding: Next Generation  Compression 
Technology Driving New Business Models for Television"  in which he made the 
case that today's transmission system might be  able to support 4K content 
with HEVC coding substituting for MPEG-2.  Below is an excerpt from the 
paper authored by Goldman and Ericsson  colleague Mark Horton:


"Early HEVC tests have shown that original  non-compressed 4K TV can be 
shown at 18 Mbps compressed and still  show stunning results. This figure 
effectively means 4K TV could  potentially be shown at bitrates currently used 
for MPEG-2 Video  based HD services."
The full paper,  along with several other papers referencing HEVC, is 
included in the  2012 NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference Proceedings, available 
 from _www.NABStore.com_ 
(http://naob-advocacy.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT0yNDgwNTkzJnA9MSZ1PTAmbGk9MTIzNTQyMTI/index.html) .  
Terminology is also an issue in beyond-HDTV systems, especially  as a 
potential confusion factor for consumers. On May 24, the  International 
Telecommunications Union (ITU) announced completion of  a new Recommendation on the 
technical details for Ultra High  Definition Television or UHDTV. UHDTV as 
defined by the ITU includes  two levels: a "4K" level of 3,840 pixels (H) X 
2,160 pixels (V) (4  times HDTV) and an "8K" level of 7,680 pixels (H) X 4,320 
pixels (V)  (16 times HDTV). NHK has been developing and demonstrating the 
8K  system known as Super Hi-Vision for several years. Super Hi-Vision  
(SHV) is likely to get significant exposure this summer as some of  the venues 
at the Summer Olympics will be captured in SHV and shown  at public sites. 
While impressive in large venues, getting the full  benefit of 8K images at 
the Lechner distance in a home environment  may prove to be elusive however. 
Extrapolating the graph above to 8K  resolution would limit the potential set 
of optimized homes to those  with castle-size doors and 12 foot-plus 
ceilings-perhaps old  Victorian homes will become all the rage with the next 
generation's  videophile crowd!  
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