Why your next TV must be a 4K
 

You need a 4k display to properly render the payload of a 1080x1920 source!
Just like they need an 8k camera to properly capture 4k cinema
http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product-F65RSPAC1/

It will no doubt look incredible, true film quality in your own living room!
I doubt there will be many sources though, the bandwidth required would break the internet, Netflix struggles as it is to deliver 1080p, but there's always Disc or Flash Drive for content.

I would like to see a resurgence of physical media, at least you actually own and control that compared to streaming.

Physical media hasn't disappeared yet. It is still possible to get DVDs and CDs; Netflix still ships physical DVDs in addition to its streaming video service (not to mention DVDs of older shows and past seasons of shows still running on the networks still selling well), and audio CDs are still available in stores.

As to "true film quality in your own living room", who needs it? This is just another attempt to reinvent television yet again (!), and eventually put movie theaters out of business. It is bad enough the FCC forced people to throw out their old TVs and replace them with flat screens; who can ever forget the pitch that was made here in northern Ohio (and likely elsewhere as well) for "The Big Switch" from analog to digital TV in 2009? There was one TV station in Cleveland which pitched that technology switch every chance it got--during commercial breaks, station breaks, during the evening news . . . as if anyone watching really cared. As has been mentioned by others, much of today's TV programming was garbage in 4:3 standard definition; it is still garbage and worse in 16:9 HD. That won't change if and when 4K becomes the standard for video transmission; the technology may change, but until the TV studios in Hollywood start making better programming, television will still be as bad as it has always been if it doesn't get worse, as it will.

Hollywood is running out of ideas for TV shows anyway; most programming today is, at best, 1950s-'60s programming warmed over or made over with the addition of violence and indecent language (think remakes of classic TV series such as "Ironside" which lasted only one or, at best, two seasons). The sometimes extreme violence on today's TV shows has caused the television industry to require content ratings on all shows except news and sports, in an effort to shield children from sex and violence, which is also why the FCC forced TV manufacturers to incorporate the so-called "V-chip" in all televisions made after 1993.

These efforts are not doing the job. Children are exposed to off-color language and violence every day of their lives on the streets, in public places, and so on; eliminating or curbing so-called "blue" language and violence on television is not going to "shield" children from what goes on in the real world. The V-chip is not working out because most people don't know how to use it, or even that it is present in their TVs; most people just take the set out of the box, connect it to a signal source, plug it into the wall, and enjoy (?) the garbage that passes for most 21st-century TV programming. There are a few good shows, many of them on ABC, but the other two major networks, NBC in particular, still program largely garbage, which is one of several reasons why NBC is still in last place in the ratings--good grief, I can remember when NBC was the top-rated network in America, but that was before VHS, DVD, streaming video . . . I see NBC going out of business before long if this trend continues any length of time. They are going down the tubes as it is since Microsoft got into the act. :no:

Please don't get me started on the problems the upstart video service Aereo is having as of late. I recently read online, in a TV-industry newsletter I get in my email daily, that the very future of the CBS television network may depend on the success or failure of Aereo as a TV program source. Indeed, the other networks could be forced into oblivion as well if Aereo wins its court battles and CBS disappears.

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh! What a mess.

:sigh: :no: :thumbsdn:

I have to say I agree with Jeffhs on this stuff, TV programing sucks. And seeing it in higher definition will just give people other stuff to talk about. As in Did you see that actor's hair replacement..? It's so obvious in 4k ! ! !

I think Airieo Is a scam... I've seen the micro dime sized antennas Funny, how many of us would get good reception with a dime sized antenna even if we lived next to the transmitter...? Wavelength anyone....? I think it's a representation of an antenna for each user, and does not take the signal off each antenna and route it to each individual end user.... I think they are a scam in that respect. They need to pay for the signal like any other mass distribution network that is not OTA from source to single end user.

As for kids, I drove a school bus for 3 years, Elementary and high school... Let me tell you those elementary kids are all X and R rated, and their parents all think they are G-Lite. This country needs to wake up to reality with everything that goes on here.... Very few live in any remote level of reality.....

Now, back to Two and a Half Men......

I'm not going to beat this Horse to death again, watch what you like, or don't.

Personally I'm very happy with HD, probably won't be buying a 4k anytime soon but by the time my current set dies I'm sure it'll probably be the norm so I'll be happy to go with it.

I'll stay in my own little low-tech world while the rest of it crumbles, thank you very much. The only hi-def capable device I have is my boring digital camera, but I have it set to record in standard def now. Recording in hi-def really sucks up battery power anyway.

BTW, I heard that CDs are losing ground to vinyl now. I guess technology can only go so far... before the truly intelligent people start to hate it anyway.

CD's are losing ground to downloads which now account for more than half of music sales.
"Vinyl" is selling better than it has in years but is still only about 3% of sales.

But I'm now thinking better source acquisition and displays will make present 1080 actually look more natural (smoother) as now 1080 can be harsh due to base-level sampling & display pixels (a mistake now being addressed) (I can do my part by buying a big 4k)(after prices moderate)

I barely watch TV anymore.. it's full of filth and negativity.

BTW, New vinyl is still too expensive to purchase. If it was under $10.00, I can see sales gaining strength !

You need it so all your real world DTV will look like a trainwreck. And you can see your Cable and Satellite providers compress the bloody heck out of it and downrez it and guarantee it looks horrible. They can't even give us present HD without ruining that. Work on real world improvements within what we have now.

I just want 4K to replace my PC monitor.

Here's two more reasons:
Good Blu-Ray transfers are mastered at 4k , so a similar overpixelated display would be nicely complementary

And the LG 3D system (the best) needs double the H pixels ( for 1920 R & L) - thus 4K

The big thing that gets missed in most discussions of high-technology displays is this:

MOVIE watching (at home) is one thing;

TELEVISION is another thing entirely. Entirely.

4K displays and other high-performance video equipment are mainly bought (and appreciated) by those who want to come as close as possible to the movie-theater experience, in their homes, within the necessary compromises. In this world, big screens and high detail, plus careful adjustment and attention to room lighting and other factors, make all the difference for a very enjoyable experience. Live sports events on video can be included in this type of system to some degree, as well.

Television, in contrast, is not at all even intended to be used or experienced that way. The one and only purpose of TV is to attract and keep the attention of viewers and to get as many of them to stay and watch the commercials. NO other purpose for the television industry, with rare exceptions (public television and pay-TV channels). In that world, quality (of either program content or the technical presentation itself) is only pursued to the degree that it will get more people to watch the commercials. HDTV, surround sound, stereo sound-none of these technologies have probably done much if anything to help sell soap and pickup trucks. Their only purpose in the television world has been to attract attention ("This is NEW! You should buy it!"... Hmm, just like the "New and Improved" laundry soap in the commercials, right? :) ) or to get ahead of/keep up with the other broadcasters/channels.

In the home-movie-watching world, though, every improvement has made a big difference in the experience. A good, large 1080 HD display with the Blu-ray version of, say, Casablanca, totally mutilates and crushes the DVD of the same movie. It just puts you there, as if you were sitting next to Humphrey Bogart himself. The best movie theaters in 1942 already did that, too (and have done so ever since); until HD displays and the Blu-ray format existed, nothing at home even came close.

4K displays have the potential to make the home experience even better, but only for those using very large displays (my 1080p screen is 92 inches diagonal) and sitting much closer than most of us are used to doing (I sit eight feet away from that 92-inch screen and would not want to be any further away from it; a 4K display should be much bigger if you sit eight feet away). NO, there is no point to use such equipment to watch a remake of "Green Acres", or "Survivor".

I've read that a 4K image is actually sharper than what our own eyes can perceive. Who needs it?

Those with more money than brains.

To get the most from a 4K display, you also need a very large room; VK member ChrisW6ATV must have a living room the size of the state of Texas if his flat screen is over ninety inches. :eek: I live in a one-bedroom apartment and could not hope to fit a 92-inch (!) 4K television in here. My own flat panel is 19 inches, and I sit ten feet away from the set. The TV is connected to the cable system by means of coax, and I am not using a cable box; this means I am definitely not seeing anything in HD on my TV, even though the set itself is capable of 720p resolution. Even my Blu-ray player, which is connected to the set via an HDMI cable, may not be showing true HD either.

As far as movies are concerned, I have several films on standard DVD in my collection, but I haven't watched any of them yet. Most of what I watch on DVD (and cable) are classic television series from the '60s and '70s; it is extremely unlikely that these DVDs were produced in HD, as the programs themselves were not HD to begin with, but old, low-definition (!) 525-line NTSC.

I don't think, either, that the classic-TV networks on cable (MeTV, Antenna TV, RTV, et al.) are showing very old classic television series in HD, since the programs were made under the old NTSC standard; upscaling these old shows to 1080p HD will not result in true high definition, although the effect, barely noticeable though it may be, will be there. I get three classic-TV networks on cable, but none of them ever advertise that their programming is presented in HD--because it probably isn't, as I am about to explain. It is almost certain that the classic shows these networks put out are nowhere near HD when they finally go out over the cable, regardless of how much the format is fiddled with behind the scenes.

VK member walterbeers has a point as far as the sharpness issue is concerned. If it is in fact true that a 4K display can produce a sharper picture than the human eye can handle, I too would wonder who would need such a thing.

I think, since every time we turn around the industry is coming out with larger and larger LCD displays, and the sets themselves can do more than any ordinary television (even the first flat screens) could possibly do in the pre-HDTV era, owning a TV these days is (or could be, in some very competitive neighborhoods) a lot like "keeping up with the Joneses"--i. e. if someone has a 50-inch flat screen and his neighbor, for example, gets a 60-inch or larger set, the first person will get a 65-inch-plus TV, just to keep up. The neighbor will then get a 70-inch TV, prompting the other person to get an even larger display; and on and on it goes. The only way it (the competition) would stop would probably, even likely, be if one or the other gets a TV so big it crowds the family out of the house. :eek:

I can actually see something like this someday happening, as flat screens are getting larger and larger all the time. It won't be long, IMHO, before we see 100-inch and larger flat screens available for home use, but I'll bet those monsters won't fit in average-sized living rooms; as well, the price tags will be so high that very few people could afford them. Not to mention that a 100-inch flat panel TV weighs something on the order of (I'm guessing) about 200 pounds or so, not unlike the large 3-way entertainment-center console CRT TV-stereo-radio combos of the '60s through about the '80s (think Magnavox with their 25" "stereo theatre" combination set of the mid-'60s; that set must have weighed the proverbial ton).

Jeff, most TV shows from I Love Lucy up until the early 70's when they started using Video Tape were shot on 35MM film, some of the DVD's of these show were made from lesser sources so they don't look all that great but if they go back to the original negatives or prints then they can be done in HD.

I Love Lucy in fact is coming out on Bluray next month and it's already been streaming on Amazon in HD.
The original Star Trek has been on Bluray for years and it looks spectacular.

People generally buy what suits their needs and 50 or 60 inches is the new 27 inch, in other words it's pretty typical these days. As for the cost, Color TV is far cheaper today than it was in the 50's 60's and 70's, particularly if you factor in screen size vs price.

You can buy one of the cheaper 50" sets today for what would have been about $75 in 1957.

I doubt sets using panels much over 70 inches will ever be common in homes, possibly for commercial use but for the home a Projector is far cheaper and more practical for really big screens.

Detail, and the number of pixels in a display needed to achieve that detail, are very much "relative", with the distance from our eyes to the display being the critical part. A "4K" display is 3840 pixels (dots) across and 2160 pixels high. Your comment "sharper than what our own eyes can perceive" is only true if you put a 4K display that is, say 55 or 65 inches diagonal (the typical sizes of the LCD sets available from Sony and others today) eight or ten feet or more away from where you sit (which, in fact, IS what most people still do with their TV sets, even HD sets). A 4K display is only worthwhile if you either:

1) Set it up so you sit VERY close to it if it is a 55-65 inch display (I mean, put it on a dining room table as if it were the centerpiece and sit "at" the table, or similar-it needs to be THAT close to see the difference from a non-4K display!), or

2) If you plan to sit at a traditional "living room watching distance" (ten feet away or more from the screen), you get a projector and a BIG screen, I mean ten FEET diagonal (120 inches) or even bigger.

The point of all this is, 4K TV sets are overkill for most people. :)

Jeff-

My 92-inch picture is actually from a ceiling-mounted video projector with a pull-down screen comparable to what was used with home movie projectors in the old days. My "casual" TV watching is on a 46-inch flat-panel TV set that hangs on the wall, hidden by the big screen when I use it to watch movies and sports. This living room is quite small, in fact, 10 and a half by 11 and a half feet. If I had a bigger living room, I would get a bigger screen! :yikes:

Good point Chris, most people don't need 4k unless they want a very large screen projector.
I have no intentions of running out and getting one but if that's the norm in the future when I need a new set then that's what I'll get.

Oh no, far from it. It doesn't really make sense to say that your eyes are equivalent to a X megapixel camera - their resolution is very high at the centre and much lower on the edges so it's comparing apples to oranges - but since your eyes are constantly moving to reconstruct a full-resolution image, you can consider that your vision is sort of like a camera that would have the pixel density of the centre of your retina. A quick calculation (available here) gives a resolution in the hundreds of megapixels, while 4K only achieves a miserable 8.3 megapixels. It will roughly take a 50-fold improvement in TV resolution to equal your bare eyes.

I was wrong about the LG 3D, it's the V resolution that is halved in 3D - and annoying when viewed close. So either way, the 4K display will fix this. That's why they prefer to employ the Sony 4K projector for 3D cinema.

I remember the pull-down movie screens. We had one in our basement years ago; used it with a 35mm slide projector. I can't give you exact dimensions, but our screen was quite large and wasn't exactly easy to pull down when in use. The projector was an Argus "Automatic 540", though I didn't know then (back in the late '60s) and can't imagine now what was automatic about it; it did not have even a wired remote. I don't recall the make of the screen, although I'm sure it was one of the major makes of home-movie equipment of the time.

I didn't think about projection TV when I said, in my last post, that you would need a very large living room to accomodate a 92-inch flat panel. You probably get a better-quality picture anyway with a projector. I understand these projection TV systems can produce excellent pictures given a strong TV signal, although with today's digital TV any pixelation or dropouts will stand out like a sore thumb on a large projection screen. Fortunately, those bugs have been worked out of cable systems for the most part, and what goes into your projector from any modern cable hookup is almost certainly flawless high-definition.

People who need to clearly see alot of things on the screen at once, without having to scroll.

Programmers. Artists. CAD people. Video editors, even ones not working on 4K files.

In other words, not the average consumer. They'll just think they need it, or will be uncool without it. That's how technology marketing works, it depends on the general public's stupidity.

By way of illustration, remember those awful SD plasmas that would kind of match pixel for pixel 480p? Clearly not the best way to display legacy TV programs. Upscaling to overpixeled 720 format was way better. Now extend that analogy to 1080p. What do we need? 2160p: smoother, less visually fatiguing, especially @ >70", which is what you should be looking at.

Any predictions as to when the 8K screens will hit the consumer market? IMHO, those *should* come pretty close to being "good enough" for all but the largest home theater applications. :scratch2:

jr

What are the actual movie theaters using, aren't they something like 4k already?
I believe they use three chip DLP systems.

Here's a page that discusses various types of acuity/resolution measures:

http://webvision.med.utah.edu/book/p...visual-acuity/

The need for imaging systems to be much better than the eye in total due to the fact that the fixation point of the viewer is unknown was expounded by the researchers at RCA in the late 40s and early 50s.

And it's not a fixed number either, as the human visual system adjusts its resolution according to ambient illlumination, whereas the display is always at the same nominal brightness, so that this adjustment does not take place in a TV viewer's eye. Thus, although your visual receptor response gets noisy at low light levels (like TV "snow"), your visual system applies just enough filtering to suppress the noise. But put a TV camera in the same situation, its picture gets noisy, and then the noise is amplified along with the brightness of the scene when displayed on the monitor, and you will see it. Net result is that the camera must do much better than the eye to present an acceptable picture.

The GoPro Hero 3 Black 4k camera records in 12fps 4k but needs their Cineform editor to convert it to something useful. I'm thinking that there may be a two-level use at home surrounding broadcast that is a while out. GoPro's and their brothers for home use below the broadcast advancements and downloading above the broadcasters. Channel bandwith is their roadblock anywhere you look. My broadcaster friends are rushing headlong to 4k equipment for recording knowing they will have to dumb down to 1080 for air but they know that. A nice place to keep up with 4k news is; http://sportsvideo.org/main/

And my Ben Hur blu-ray is like I never saw the movie before.

Didn't know some were already using 4K cameras, good to hear.
And what's this? a 200ft 4K display! http://sportsvideo.org/main/blog/201...ew-4k-display/

The better Cineplex's use the Sony 4K LCOS projectors
(I've compared these to theaters w/ Christie 2K DLP installations)
They should really use 8K but no-one wants to build one as even Sony often loses money.
Would be hard to display 8K due to lens errors and focus errors over flat screen?
Also new screens not as large as old 70mm era (curved screens, better lenses)
as 70mm would be like 8K resolution at least.

And we have trouble enough delivering on air 780p images reliably with 5.1 surround sound. Cable even degrades and compresses that as does satellite. 4K is not real life, some TV commercials and content is still SD. This is the East Tennessee real world here, not some laboratory. Virtually all of our theaters here are 4K at best. Our Knoxville area TV stations have not done Local News and Programming in 780p HDTV until about 2 years ago, they are still paying for all that new equipment. Sony theater projectors are also not very well loved by projectionists and cinema owners, this gear is expensive. Support is everything. Also, add to that the sub channels on DTV and the need for paying for the DTV conversion not too long ago. Broadcast gear is far from inexpensive.

We all know what happened to Titanic because it was moving too fast. I see the same thing happening to technology.

Indeed. 4K is well and good, but how is it going to be delivered practically without being compressed to fit in more channels. More practical to fix what we have now and try to improve it.

A 4k LED panel can be as small as 25' wide -- who needs projectors
http://www.panasonic.com/business/pe...1162_FINAL.pdf

So it looks like Panasonic can mass produce these square-foot modules with "surface-mount diodes" (on a printed circuit) with an impressive 1.9mm pixel pitch. These are optimized for indoor light intensity and linearized for decent gamma/grayscale. Remember when critics said LCDs can not give a hi fi picture and CRTs were the only option for purists?

Giving foreign industry over $1k of my dough just doesn't appeal to me. We cannot allow corporations, domestic or foreign, to summon us to a "Sorry, your TV is obsolete, now gimme your money, please" event every few years...

My feelings exactly, especially the foreign corporations considering that they stole almost all of our manufacturing.

I bought a Channel Lock adjustable wrench recently, one of very few North-American made tools I could find new. It was expensive, but I consider it a good investment and was pleased to be able to do something to support U.S. manufacturing. Oh, my new ESR meter is U.S.-made too, got one while I could.