Mega-res telly demand to boom, say ball-gazers

Re: Nah

I'd imagine the next gen of 4k screens will come with a decent computer on the back to allow them to be 'connected'.

I've always thought Sony have been missing a trick by not lumping a PS3 into their high end TVs. Not only would it drive BR or Game sales, it would also bring people to their online shop, and as an added bonus would make all the on screen graphics damn pretty. (Instead of all the graphics that appear to be from the 16bit era like all TV makers seem to have.) Also there must be masses of duplication with a PS3+Play chucked into a TV, so the savings on the package would be pretty good too.

when a computer is capable of doing the job

What makes you think people aren't watching Netflix on TV? Modern TVs have it built in and the rest of us just use the PS3/XBox/Wii or plug a laptop into the TV. Meaning you have a computer AND a TV.

Do You

Want to buy all your favourite films AGAIN in new '4K HD' ???

I don't think you do.

Re: are these...

Having done all the work of putting the extra pixels for 1080p in 3D, changing the screens for 4k isn't too much of a challenge and Blu-Ray upscales reasonably well.

I don't see a new media format being used for this - it looks like an excellent opportunity for premium broadband for the usual suspects: cable operators and content providers (Utlraviolet), as people get used to streaming as opposed to physical media.

Need to do some back of the envelope calculations but a lot of people probably already have sufficient bandwidth for receiving, thought you'd probably want to have a fairly generous buffer to be sure. Serving the stuff might be another matter but content providers have a considerable interest in recovering business already lost to Netflix/Lovefilm etc.

Bluray already has a standardized format capable of 128GB, and there are other much higher capacity bluray formats in the lab, the highest I've heard of was around 500GB but the theoretical limit is supposedly somewhere around 5TB.

But with the new codec they plan to use for 4K the 128GB disks should be sufficient.

Sky and Cable could do 4k without too much chaos although it would likely need a new codec + stb, freeview\freesat would probably need more reworking due to how it is structured & regulated. Content will come from a variety of sourced, you mention cable, Virgin offers broadband that could stream 4k and BT is heading that way with its new network. Bluray as a physical medium can cope with 4k although it will need new hardware and a tweak in the standards if not a new codec but it won't need to be replaced altogether.

Re: You will have to wait...

You don't mean "Apple invents", you mean "Apple packages". Unless you can prove me wrong by stating a single proper invention other than arguably the aluminium unibody process.

Re: You will have to wait...

There are quite a few companies with 4k displays \ projectors out there, some since 2007, I know of Chinese, Korean, Japanese companies etc, none of them Apple. However, I am sure when Apple does release a 4k set it will look awesome, their propaganda department will claim its made with pixie jizz , history will be rewritten and they will be the first to have done it. Then the lawsuits will start.

More than that...

I had a terrible response from 4OD at my parents house over Christmas -- someone was clearly throttling it somewhere along the line, as multi-megabyte software installs downloades pretty damn quickly, and 4OD was fine at "unsocial hours". And I used to work in an office that became distinctly unproductive after 3:30 when schoolkids got home and choked up the BT bandwidth that we needed to connect to our data centre hundreds of miles away.

There isn't quite enough capacity on the internet as it is, and squeezing extra pixels into the next series of Strictly isn't a good use of what there is.

And besides, while I'd never underestimate the ability of codec writers, I'd never overestimate the intelligence of codec implementers either. MP3 was long derided as a useless music format because (as I understand it) the most popular encoders in commercial use for over a decade were really really bad at encoding music without degrading the signal atrociously.

And consider the whole backward compatibility problem -- DAB is rubbish and there's a better option (DAB+), but we can't use it because there's existing sets that don't support it. The only reason we've been able to move to Freeview+ is because of HD. Freeview+ on SD would give superior results, but it would render a lot of kit obsolete.

So if the codec writers produce that amazing new mathemagic just a little bit too late, we won't get to use it....

All 3D means is that it can go at 120Hz instead of 60 (or 100 / 50 depending on location) and many TVs did this even before the rise of 3D, plus a few pence spent on an IR device to sync the goggles.

If you don't want your new TV to be 3D enabled, just don't buy the glasses. Or poke an eye out, whatever suits you.

I think that is the whole point...

Re: Cart meet horse

Why won't you be able to download 4k content? If the bitrate is too much for streaming, we'll see providers reverting to download copies as a sales method.

Re: Seriously? A million units in 2015?

>These guys are crazy.

You are inummerate:

Capegemini, a financial consultancy, defines a millionaire as anyone with investable assets of $1 million or more – meaning that they actually have over a million dollars as that doesn't include the home in which they live, for instance. By this measure there are about 10 million millionaires on the planet, according to Capegemini and Merrill Lynch.

So even if just 10% of millionaires bought one each, that figure would be about right. You say lack of content? That is is so easy to fix, even with existing media- just use a HDD media server, doesn't matter if individual Blu-rays have to loaded onto it first (the butler can do it). Or, shocker, have a media server with 3 x Blu-ray ROMs, cos at £40 they will really break the millionaire's bank.

Re: Time would be better spent improving gamma and dynamic range.

Yes, this.

Not only that, the focus (err) on resolution is further harmed by this:

"don’t underestimate the ability of codec writers to devise even more efficient ways of squeezing much larger images through barely wider pipes."

...unless they're going to improve lossless compression by 4x, this means that the uber high-resolution will max out at about the same level of high frequency content as we have now.

Add that to the fact that broadcast HD is already crippled frequency-wise - I've seen plenty of 'HD' stations where macroblocking effectively cuts the spatial resolution to NTSC levels for anything but a static image - and to the continuing push for streaming content delivery, which is even *more* limited, and... yeah, aside from gaming and direct computer stuff, I don't see it working really well.

And with gaming itself crippled by horribly out-of-date consoles that are still struggling to deliver 1080p for some games, I don't see the next gen able to supply high quality graphics to 3892xWhatever; even the new monstrous PC cards have a tough time maxing things out at 3x1920x1200, and those cards have, I don't know, 8x, 16x, the raw pixel pushing power of current consoles?

You know what I want to see? *Actual* HDR. We've spent a ton of time trying to match the perceived spatial resolution of the real world, so, great - but as Graham points out, we're still way the hell off on color reproduction.

Show me a TV that can light up my room like an open window, while retaining near-zero blacks, and I'll start to get excited.

Re: Time would be better spent improving gamma and dynamic range.

>At least 13 or 14 stops dynamic range should be the short-term target for digital image sensors so we can enter >the High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) era.

Easily done... just use two cameras and a half-silvered mirror at 45º. You can get cameras such as Canon's C300 that can capture video in situations we can barely see with our own eyes. The correct balance can then be worked out in post production. There was a good video demonstration of this technique featuring a welding torch, HDR'd to the max.

More dynamic range would be good, but I don't think it is necessary to create an image that is indistinguishable from a window, at least for narrative storytelling. Time will tell. Let's see how Peter Jackson's 48fps goes down with film makers and audiences.

You have a point, but most normal-peoples' computer operations are RAM / storage-bound, not CPU-bound. Running a bunch of browsers doesn't use much CPU, but it chomps RAM like nobody's business; same with productivity stuff. Yeah, you'll be sitting waiting when you're doing gaussian blurs in Photoshop, but even then, stuff like InDesign and Illustrator should be mostly good.

For general non-gaming use, I'd take a relatively crap CPU, SSD, and 8gb over an i7 with 4gb and a 5400rpm hard drive any day.