4K Ultra HD Likely To Repeat the Failure of 3D Television 559
New submitter tvf_trp writes "Fox Sports VP Jerry Steinbers has just announced that the broadcaster is not looking to implement 4K broadcasting (which offers four times the resolution of today's HD), stating that 4K Ultra HD is a 'monumental task with not a lot of return.' Digital and broadcasting specialists have raised concerns about the future of 4K technology, drawing parallels with the 3D's trajectory, which despite its initial hype has failed to establish a significant market share due to high price and lack of 3D content. While offering some advantages over 3D (no need for specs, considerable improvement in video quality, etc), 4K's prospects will remain precarious until it can get broadcasters and movie makers on board."
Problem is, most content struggles to do 1080p (Score:4, Interesting)
As it is right now, the only true 1080p content is high bitrate blu-ray disks, and PC games. There is nothing else.
None of the currently released consoles can render 1920x1080 at 60 fps : they use a lower frame rate (30 fps) and a lower rendering resolution (not even 720p internally for most games). The next gen can maybe do it, but I suspect that some games will use lower frame rates or internal resolutions so that they can put more detail into other things.
Broadcast channels, satellite channels, and HD cable channels all generally are full of lower bit-rate tradeoffs. You need about 30-50 mbps to do 1080p without compromises or visible encoding errors.
Maybe in another 10 years, when the technology is actually fully utilizing the 1080p displays we already have, will an upgrade make sense.
Note that this is for video content. For your computer or tablet PC, higher resolutions are useful, and shipping tablets are already at higher resolutions.
Re:I would love 4K!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because it's being force fed to you, it doesn't mean you are actually using it.
I own a Smart TV but I have a Roku attached to it. If my next TV also has "smart tv" features, they will be completely transparent to me. It's like a PC that has a force bundled copy of Windows on it.
Will never see it. Will never use it.
The real question here is "where's the content?".
Re:I would love 4K!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
the Macbook Air is a specialist laptop specifically designed to be smaller, thinner and lighter. Apple has lots of laptops with 2560x1600 resolution, you just chose one designed for a different purpose.
Why do so many tablets have a higher resolution (and probably higher quality) display than the Air then? Even the iPad Mini has a higher resolution.
Re:Fix HD First (Score:4, Interesting)
If an option, use ffdshow. Add noise.
Best way to turn almost all compression artifacts into regular noise. Your brain is great at perceiving that as being higher quality imagery.
Using post resize noise or post resize sharpening (MPC-HC or MPC-BE sharpen complex 2) also works great to turn 720p content into '1080p'.
Re:I would love 4K!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm just a simpleton, but I recently went out to get a new monitor.
I ended up getting a 1080p 23 inch LED TV instead and just plug in my PC via HDMI.
Now, like I said, I'm a simpleton, and I'm sure other people can make use of much higher resolutions or other characteristic that my simple eyes and brain cannot process.
But for me, I sat there staring at the monitor and then the TVs. Then I looked at the price; they're about the same and it just made sense to get the TV. It comes with built in sound, a remote control (good for sound control too).
Re:There really is no point (Score:4, Interesting)
I take it you've never played a first-person game on a 40" screen. Granted I'm usually a little closer to 3' away (arms length is the recommended distance to sit from a monitor). Filling a larger portion of your FOV is a great way to boost immersiveness. And yes, I do have to move my eyes a lot to see the full detail in the corner of the screen, but I have to do that out in the real world to.
Works great for office work as well (though that 4K resolution would be a huge bonus), in which case I'm generally only looking at a portion of the screen at a time, but can switch between tasks/monitor different things simply by moving my eyes, almost like working on a physical desk. And it's a big boost over multiple monitors in that you can size windows to whatever size and aspect ratio makes sense for the tasks at hand.
Re:I want my games to have all the pixels! (Score:4, Interesting)
The x1080 is more popular as a TV because movies are filmed in 16::9.
No they aren't.
HDTV is shot at 16:9 because that's what the TVs are. But movies are usually wider, at 1.85:1 or 2.40:1.
16:9 was chosen because it was more or less a compromise between the common widescreen film ratios and the narrower 4:3 SDTV and 1.375:1 Academy ratios.
There's a good youtube video about this sort of thing here [youtube.com], and the wiki article on the 16:9 ratio [wikipedia.org] is also handy.
Now it may well come to pass that movies will be shot in a native 16:9 ratio, but so far the trend is simply to make sure that all the action fits into that area when they crop the image for transfer to home video.
Of course, the moderate popularity of IMAX weirds things a bit. I remember seeing the Bluray release of The Dark Knight, parts of which were filmed for IMAX, which has a 1.44:1 ratio. The rest of the movie was in a more typical 2.40:1 ratio. Their solution was to present the conventionally filmed parts of the movie letterboxed, but to show the IMAX sections in 16:9, filling the frame of the TV, but still cropping the top and bottom of the original image.