If you’re a gadget hound like me, you probably spent hours agonizing over the purchase of your TV.
It’s one of the few purchases in your home most people don’t intend to replace every year or so, so you make your choice and dammit you live with it.
But that 1080p flat screen TV you just bought is about to be obsoleted. BIG TIME.
The BBC and Japanese opposite number NHK have completed trials of Super Hi-Vision broadcasts across the world at a jaw-dropping 7,680 x 4,320 pixel resolution.
At sixteen times the quality of 1080p, this makes current high-def broadcasting look like analog television from 1965.
The bad news, and yeah, there’s always bad news, is that at 24Gb per second, the transfer cannot be sent via satellite, only high quality broadband internet lines. Also, you’ll need a 7,680p resolution TV, which doesn’t exist yet.
NHK is hoping the system will be ready in time for the 2012 Olympics, but are there really enough gadget freaks out there to support a jump to this level of quality, even if the cost is only marginally increased?
Stritcly speaking it’ll be a 4320i/p TV as 1080p/i and 720p/i refer to the vertical resolution not horizontal. It’s a resolution they already use in digital film called 4K.
Actually, 4K is 2160p… correcting myself. The resolution you refer to above would be 8K in digital film parlance.
At larger resolutions then 2K the visual difference would be moot. The finite details would be lost to the human eye much as audio bit-rates above 320kbs never sound any better then said rate.
That is unless you have a 40 foot LCD screen in your house… And a video processor capable of processing 8K at 30 frames per second (which would cost tens of thousands of $s).
But, yes, would be good tech for public events where a 40 – 60 foot screen is reality.