The Bridge on the River Kwai
Really?!
Fancy a 4K x 2K TV - aka '4K Ultra HD' - but you’re worried you won’t have any native content to watch on the living room filler? Look to Sony. Today, the consumer electronics giant announced a server box stuffed with ten 3840 x 2160 movie transfers ready to play. The Amazing Spiderman, Total Recall (2012), The Karate Kid ( …
As long as there's a good-quality negative or film reel still around (ie a basically uncompressed format) there shouldn't be any problem getting that kind of quality.
And with or without BORK that's a pretty good list of movies for variety and (for the ones I've seen at least) quality.
Anyone know what Total Recall 2012 is like? And does Eccentrica Gallumbits still have a cameo?
Actually no, the resolution of film is not infinite. The main problem with film is that it has a bad frequency response. While video has a fairly flat one, film tends to blur details a bit. The effect gets worse and worse with the number of generations you have. The "Master" typically already is at least 1-2 generations down from what was inside the camera.
Although you can use an "equalizer" this will also increase your grain.
I think Sony once linked to an interesting article on that from the early 1990s (back when HDTV was all the rage) which said that 32mm stock is at about 2k when it arrives in the cinema, and you can reach a bit higher quality by producing in HD then copying it to 35mm.
Wow, so back when companies were trying to sell 2K technology to consumers, they were telling everyone that 2K was "as good as it gets" ? Do we think that perhaps, just maybe, they were telling small porkies simply in order to extract the $'s from Joe Consumer's pocket ?
If you use your eyes, rather than taking at face value the marketing/sales pitch for any given technology, it's quite evident that 2K doesn't come anywhere close to resolving even 35mm film faithfully.
At those resolutions, the film grain's probably gonna stand out. Meaning we're approaching the detail limits of the original films (they were already pretty close with 1080p resolutions). Higher resolutions probably aren't going to do much from here out with older content.
No, 1080P (the domestic version of "2K") doesn't even begin to come close to resolving all the detail in film. $K comes close, but even that leaves some room to go, which is why 8K is in the works. Don't believe me ?
http://digitalcontentproducer.com/mag/video_digital_cinemas_special/index.html
And that's just 35mm.
Anyone that thinks 2K is the limit, or even approaches the limit, of detail resolution in film is either blind or is selling 2K gear.
depends on your eyes. i can clearly see the difference between 720p and 1080p at around 6-7ft. and thats without my glasses! with my specs on (rarely use them) its crystal clear.
but then again i could never watch 60hz CRT monitors, when most people i worked with couldnt see the flicker. i guess some people just have a more anal eye
i really want a 4k glasses free 3d TV. might be a while though!
it actually doesn't depend on your eyes. much. there is a thing called the Rayleigh criterion. it's just the physics regarding the geometry of your eyes.
in the same way as an optical telescope's resolving power is determined by the size of the aperture and wave length. no matter how well made or anal the telescope is the resolving limit is definite.
have a spread sheet. http://nigelcoldwell.co.uk/test/tvview.xls
Nigel's right: we often confuse, and manufacturers and broadcaster peddling new things encourage us in this, resolution with other factors. The difference in codecs between SD and HD is probably what most people notice and think it's the resolution whereas it's largely artefacts caused by the codec and reduced detail down to lower sampling rates. But resolution is much more marketable than boring things like that hence the "retina" fad. Me, I'll take higher contrast and colour range over resolution any time, but maybe I'm just weird.
Not as far away as you think.
My company demo'd a 60" glasses free 3D 4k screen
In London this week.
It's not a lenticular or paralex barrier type screen and is simply awesome.
Using front to back pixel shift so no issues with viewing angle.
Keep your eye out if your at CES this year!
Anon for obvious reasons.
More apparent than SD images on a TV for sure, but no more apparent than they were in the movie theatre. Then again, many people don't go to the theatre these days and have perhaps forgotten what a decent picture looks like (and sadly the same is true of too many theatre operators themselves - poorly focussed projectors will obscure the detail in film behind a smear of blurry fuzz).
The bottom line is that a 40" screen in a typical living room is still nowhere near as large in your field of view as a typical theatre screen, and even a 1080P image from a 1080P source is not going to show as much detail as a theatrically projected film would.
When people complain about the "too much detail" of 1080P on their TV's, I suspect it is the gamut of motion artefact processing, contrast amplification and all the other super duper digital processing whizz-bang features that they have enabled that is too blame.
NOT the number of pixels.
Otherwise cinema goers for years would have been complaining about the same thing.
For once, a sensible suggestion. IMAX has a much higher detail limit (due to larger, newer film media). If 4K isn't enough to fully render the film grain of a 35mm film, then reaching the limits of IMAX will probably not come for at least a decade, probably with something like a screen with 20,000-line resolution, and maybe not even then.