Sony Creates Colossal 16K Screen In Japan (bbc.com) 56
Sony has unveiled a display that contains 16 times as many pixels as a 4K TV and 64 times as many as a regular 1080p high definition TV. "This will let viewers stand close to the unit -- which is longer than a bus -- without its image looking blurred," report the BBC. From the report: The 63ft by 17ft (19.2m by 5.4m) screen is currently being installed at a new research center that has been built for the Japanese cosmetics group Shiseido in the city of Yokohama, south of Tokyo. It is so large it will stretch between the first and second floors. The development was announced by Sony at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show, which is currently being held in Las Vegas.
Sony had previously designed a separate 16K display that went on show at Tokyo's Haneda Airport in 2014, but that looked like it was made up of dozens of smaller screens rather than presenting a single seamless picture. The new "super-size" installation has in fact been created out of several modular panels, but because they do not have bezels they can be fitted together without any visible gaps to create the impression of being a single screen. The innovation does not require a backlight, but goes much brighter than OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens while still delivering similar deep blacks. At present, however, the high manufacturing costs involved make it too expensive for widespread use.
Sony had previously designed a separate 16K display that went on show at Tokyo's Haneda Airport in 2014, but that looked like it was made up of dozens of smaller screens rather than presenting a single seamless picture. The new "super-size" installation has in fact been created out of several modular panels, but because they do not have bezels they can be fitted together without any visible gaps to create the impression of being a single screen. The innovation does not require a backlight, but goes much brighter than OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens while still delivering similar deep blacks. At present, however, the high manufacturing costs involved make it too expensive for widespread use.
Just one problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Just one problem (Score:5, Informative)
Cones, which do detect color are only around 6 or 7 million in quantity. Using the 7 million number, that would make a matrix of a bit less than 2.65k x 2.65k.
Locke2005s statement is in between those numbers, so he's not exactly right or wrong, but it's not bullshit at all.
Looks like the anonymous coward had no idea how crappy the resolution of human eyes actually are.
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Posts like this are why I still occasionally read slashdot.
People also forget that detail is concentrated in the center field of vision, whereas a 16MP camera is full resolution for the full frame.
It's amazing what the human brain can do with the input from the eye (not that the eye isn't remarkable in many ways as well).
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Cones (colour) are concentrated in the centre. Rods (black and white) dominate the periphery.
The idea being we need to see in full colour directly ahead, but have the sensitivity to detect subtle movement / predators in our peripheral vision. (Go nature !)
Trivia:
Ever notice in a very dark room you may tilt your head a little / look askance at an object? It's because you're instinctively trying to use the rods (black and white) which work better than cones (colour) in low light.
Re: Just one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, except that the rods and cones are NOT packed evenly. Your assumption that they lay in a nice uniform grid does not reflect reality.
In reality, the number of photosensitive cells are between 100 and 1000 times higher in the centralmost part of vision, the fovea, than in the periphery.
Our eyes and brains do an exceptional job of integrating information across different visual glances to give us a deep, persistent illusion of uniformly high-resolution vision. And while the resolution at the center of our vision is really quite good (about 60 cycles per degree of visual angle), it gets rather poor rather quickly.
There's a nice parlor trick to convince yourself of the existence of this illusion: take a paragraph of printed material. Printed material works well, but the exact text does not matter so much. Place your finger under a word in the middle of a paragraph. Using your finger as a guide to hold your gaze fixed, look at that word and try to read left and right WITHOUT moving your eyes. Use your finger as a guide. You should find that for most text you can read at most one or two words to the left or right, and perhaps the word immediately above. Beyond that, vision is too low resolution.
So, back to the original point, counting the number of photosensitive cells underestimates the effective resolution of human vision by at least a factor of 10 once you take into account that we move our eyes.
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>> Our eyes and brains do an exceptional job of integrating information across different visual glances to give us a deep, persistent illusion of uniformly high-resolution vision.
YES ! The brain is a remarkable computer.
Of course, there many situations in which the brain makes patently wrong conclusions [wikipedia.org]
But on the whole, I think the human brain is one of the most remarkable things in the universe.
Re: Just one problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Locke2005s statement is in between those numbers, so he's not exactly right or wrong, but it's not bullshit at all.
Counting that way is wonky because we have a very small, high density area in the center of our vision and much lower in the rest. The standard measure of visual acuity (20/20) is resolving one arc minute (1/60th of a degree) of resolution. If you sit really close to the screen you get a ~50 degrees field of view so 3000 pixel horizontal resolution. But we know some people have down to 20/8 vision, so for them 3000*20/8 = 7500 pixel resolution.
However if you're viewing parallel lines you can get a kind of hyper-acuity called Vernier acuity [sciencedirect.com] that even in untrained people go down to 10 arc seconds and 2-3 arc seconds with training. Now 2 arc seconds (1/3600 of a degree) * 50 degrees = 90K, obviously we don't have that many photo receptors but if you want to make a screen of uniform density that's where you're at. It's pretty much irrelevant for viewing normal content though.
With all that said, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone claiming a razor sharp 4K movie is fuzzy, unless you're staring at a Snellen chart the main reason they want to go beyond 4K is to be able to crop and re-frame in post. There's lots of other things like dynamic range, color space, color fidelity, frame rate etc. you should work on before going beyond 4K as an end point. Probably the biggest thing is if they can finally manage to make CMOS sensors work with global shutter - that is to say, reading out all the pixels at once instead of line by line, which creates all kinds of distortions when things are in rapid motion.
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Re: (Score:2)
Presumably these numbers are best cases - young'uns' eyes?
Re: (Score:2)
Presumably these numbers are best cases - young'uns' eyes?
The short version is that if you see 20/20 without glasses/contact lenses you don't need them, but many people have better vision than that when they're young or they can get better than 20/20 with glasses/contact lenses. Often the problem when you get older is the ability to focus, not the actual sharpness if you wear the right glasses but of course people lose visual acuity to some some degree. So as a video standard you should aim higher than 20/20, at least 20/16. It's up to your purpose, are you lookin
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*Wipes a tear*
I love Slashdot.
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Looks like the anonymous coward had no idea how crappy the resolution of human eyes actually are.
The brain helps to give the impression that human eyes have infinite resolution.
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According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] an eagle can spot a rabbit up to 3.2 km away !!
Just wow.
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At approximately 120,000,000 rods, which do not sense color, if it were a convenient square arrangement, that would be a bit less than 11k x 11k.
Cones, which do detect color are only around 6 or 7 million in quantity. Using the 7 million number, that would make a matrix of a bit less than 2.65k x 2.65k.
Counting rods and cones is an irrelevant meaningless endeavor. Rods are not even worth mentioning WRT TV because they can't resolve any detail.
What matters is degree of arc resolvable by cones and pixels per degree that can be discriminated which amounts to roughly 1MP (1k x 1k)
Of course this whole metric is bullshit to begin with for the simple reason eyes are not fixed in their sockets nor is head position fixed WRT to display.
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Theory is all good until humans sit in front of a new screen and enjoy art, sport, computer games and entertainment.
Then see if/how 16K content sells on the open market.
Is 8K really a limit? Do people like their new 16K content more over 8K?
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Human eyes can't discern more than about 4000x4000 pixels in their field of vision.
Which is irrelevant because humans instinctively shift their gaze and in doing so take in far more than the individual points in their field of vision are capable of seeing in any snapshot in time.
Human eyes are actually quite shit, horrible colour definition at the edges, poor focus area, poor ability to discern dark objects in the centre. It's the processing in our brains combined with us constantly moving our eyes that makes our vision worth a damn at all.
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To be fair the second line of the summary mentions that the use-case is people standing close to the screen, i.e. only seeing part of it in their field of vision.
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Human eyes can't discern more than about 4000x4000 pixels in their field of vision.
It's more like 1000x1000 yet this metric is meaningless because eyeballs and head are not fixed at a single point.
Pixels per degree of arc is what matters in discerning whether piling on more pixels is helpful or wasteful.
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Human eyes can't discern more than about 4000x4000 pixels in their field of vision.
Why would you want to discern the individual pixels of the image you are viewing? That would make for a shitty viewing experience. I want to see the image, not its component pixels.
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Enough (Score:2, Offtopic)
640k should be enough for anyone.
Bad maths (Score:4, Interesting)
There is some obvious bad maths in the article. The screen is not composed out of 4*4 "4K televisions".
A "4K TV" has an aspect ratio of 16:9, whereas this screen has an aspect ratio of 32:9.
So, if it is "16K" across, then it is only equivalent to eight "4K" TV screens, not sixteen.
And that's not mentioning that "16K" here is 4 * "4K" = 4 * 3840 = 15360 = 15 * 1024 ...
But Sony is counting like Sony is counting. Back a few years ago it was Sony who had started the convention of calling "UltraHD" standad "4K.
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Pffft, still small. (Score:2, Funny)
Still not as big as Frank's 2000" TV.
It's called "MicroLED" (Score:2)
They're basically making a display out of tiny but normal LEDs. As they said -- very bright, and infinite contrast. But mostly only useful for commercial displays due to the limited density.
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They're basically making a display out of tiny but normal LEDs. As they said -- very bright, and infinite contrast. But mostly only useful for commercial displays due to the limited density.
For now, Samsung has shown a 75 inch UHD prototype so it's not impossible to make them small - just hard and expensive. I wouldn't mind lower density if they can get production cost down though, I'd rather have a TV with half the density and twice the size. Like 150" with 4x1080p pixels. The good thing about MicroLED is that price will scale linearly with size, so I'm guessing a bunch of sheikhs will order a 225" TVs because it's "only" 9x the price of the 75" TV. Though we don't know the base price for the
Holy... (Score:1)
Weird Al Predicted this... (Score:2)
Important question... (Score:2)
If I wanted to play Crysis on that ... (Score:1)
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well as long as yhe source (broadcaster/disk autor/steramiong service provides the correct meta data and the display (and /or stb etc)bothers to actually read it, most people shuld be fine, with setting aspect ratio to auto right (is y\tha not the default well it should be)
16K to shove ads into your eyes! (Score:2)
Once this new monitor is sold to regular consumers, I am sure that Sony will not forget to upload this important patch [arstechnica.com]
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