4K Monitors...

[Marc Wielage]

4K monitors are all well and good, but I'm still concerned with the delivery mechanism to get the data to home users. Even in 2012, the amount of compression used in puny 1080 is pretty horrendous. Read what ZDNet writer George Ou says in his essay Don't Believe the Low-Bit HD Lie. The HD you see on most cable systems or downloads is very highly-compressed HD; Blu-ray can be pretty good at high bitrates.

My fear is that if and when we get 4K on cable and/or broadcast, it's going to be compressed so badly, it'll look like crap. 4K is just a number. Guaranteed, by the time iPhone 6 or 7 comes out, they'll have it in the phone -- and it'll look awful. Still technically 4K, but not good pictures.

[Jack Shanahan]

4K monitors are all well and good, but I'm still concerned with the delivery mechanism to get the data to home users. Even in 2012, the amount of compression used in puny 1080 is pretty horrendous. Read what ZDNet write George Ou says in his essay Don't Believe the Low-Bit HD Lie. The HD you see on most cable systems or downloads is very highly-compressed HD; Blu-ray can be pretty good at high bitrates.

My fear is that if and when we get 4K on cable and/or broadcast, it's going to be compressed so badly, it'll look like crap. 4K is just a number. Guaranteed, by the time iPhone 6 or 7 comes out, they'll have it in the phone -- and it'll look awful. Still technically 4K, but not good pictures.

I couldnt agree more with this. My Time Warner Cable "HD" looks like complete and utter &#!%. Whata ripoff too. I bought a season of Modern Family on Amazon and streamed it to my 42" Sony and it looked way better than when the show airs on Cable. Whats the deal with that? Can cable companies just compress as they choose? That seems redonk.

[Steve Sherrick]

There's a popular sports talk show host here in Boston (Glenn Ordway, WEEI) who talks about 4K quite frequently on his show. He's always into the latest home theater tech. The good news is that he reaches a lot of people in this market and even beyond, so a few more Glenn Ordways preaching this to the masses and you never know where it could go. :-)

[Josh Beadle]

4K monitors are all well and good, but I'm still concerned with the delivery mechanism to get the data to home users. Even in 2012, the amount of compression used in puny 1080 is pretty horrendous. Read what ZDNet write George Ou says in his essay Don't Believe the Low-Bit HD Lie. The HD you see on most cable systems or downloads is very highly-compressed HD; Blu-ray can be pretty good at high bitrates.

My fear is that if and when we get 4K on cable and/or broadcast, it's going to be compressed so badly, it'll look like crap. 4K is just a number. Guaranteed, by the time iPhone 6 or 7 comes out, they'll have it in the phone -- and it'll look awful. Still technically 4K, but not good pictures.

Yup, like cell phones . . . isn't Sprint promoting 6G now?

[Wayne Morellini]

Dear Jannard,
First you put film in a lead-lined coffin and welded it shut with your astounding invention and now, apparently, you’re stalking HD, with intent.
You are my hero!

Probably not, I came up with a design concept years ago for electronic film potentially much more sensitive and versitile than a Red sensor, maybe any I have heard off (the ones used in scientific research are pretty good). I relised that I could use it as a sensor as it was reusable. Very sensitive stuff, even photons released from mechahical shutter and frame advance mechanisms might be recordable, would be interesting to see what the signal to noise ratio would turn out like in real life.

Sure most large TV manufacturers are making them but they're not going to work their way into homes on a mass scale for a long time. Consumers were just convinced to upgrade to a 1080 TV (hell, most of my DirecTV channels are still standard def) and there's no way the entire TV industry overhalls all their equip for 4K or the consumer market upgrades their TVs in the near future - my guess is a minimum 10 years before we see 4k really take a hold.

In ten years time they might be standard and old with 8k. If they release now, sales in two years can be good given a lower price, as 1080 is going to be old by then and sales dropped off as a lot of people have bought a good 1080p set already. What they are probably interested in is a low volume of high profit margin top end sets al inside the cheaper 1080p sets. It is not like the 1080i fiasco which was way ahead of the technology to deliver it cheap, and was not advanced enough or cheap enough for years. 720p however, offered a lot better lower cost alternative for years before 1080i took off, with 1440p a worthy replacement for TV and film in a similar timeframe to when 1080 finally took off. Apart from that, 4k is overdue in technology terms, so much so you could do a cheap 4k pocket camera today, 8k would still be a challenge to do cheaply (though maybe less so in display panels). The profit margins for 4k as a top end consumer product could be enormous. I suppose the validation is that as they increase yeild on larger and larger panel sizes, 1080 becomes inadequate. All they need to do is start the ball rolling for a whole new profit realm as the world comes out of recession.

it's funny, 10 years seems to always be the magic number with the guesses. fact of the matter is, it's all moving much much faster than anybody ever expected. it's always cinefiles first, and than years for it to make proper penetration into everyday house hold, but where it really starts is when the cine files jump on board. the home theater is like the mid life crisis or new sports car to a lot of people these days. but i think the most important thing is that 4k acquisition will really start having 4k delivery. starting with the big screen, than the web (which is integrating with television at a rapid pace) and whatever ultra high quality home medium may it be. I know sony is already working on a way to get 4k blu ray going. If redcode can look good at 12-24mbps out of a red ray, why not a more effecient codec at the same bitrate for 4k optical? sky is the limit.

Speaking of Sky, a satellite or cable network is a good avenue for something like redray to start, as a 19mb/s channel is severely limited when it comes to quality 1080i or p60, not too mention cable and future internet services. With these services a set top box is required and can be made to do redray (thinking future imagination technology's general purpose computing gpu, and arm core. Simple, technical. The biggest limitation is in 19mb/s TV channels, they needed to be of the same maximum quality as bluray and h264, at least double for 4k. We are talking about over 70mb/s to get descent quality, with h265 we are still talking about nearly 50mb/s . I maybe in favor of multiple channel aggregation, but I am yet to hear of one TV station that is. So what is needed is something like redray or a superior system like I was designing years ago.

[Wayne Morellini]

There's a popular sports talk show host here in Boston (Glenn Ordway, WEEI) who talks about 4K quite frequently on his show. He's always into the latest home theater tech. The good news is that he reaches a lot of people in this market and even beyond, so a few more Glenn Ordways preaching this to the masses and you never know where it could go. :-)

Can you imagine a group of guys watching a 4k or 8k telecast of a football match on a 200 inch+ screen? You could replay that annually for years, and people would still be seeing something they did nit see before on the 200 inch+ screen.

@guys
4g is 100-400mb/s and I forget if they were talking about 1gb/s, definetly enough for 4k, but you try to get a consistent rate like that even without anybody else using the network. But there is potential for broadcast to set top boxes. When you look at this, you could setup a channel over 4g, another use for redray.

[Carey Lee Coffey]

Yes, the problem is in the delivery. I used to work for the cable company, and believe me, they are too busy lining CEO pockets to invest money into new technology. The whole cable infrastructure is rapidly deteriorating, and they're playing golf. Don't expect to get a perfect 4K image delivered to your home via cable any time soon. It's all about dollars and sense.

[Hudson Tanimoto]

Some years ago I spent $3000 on a standard def 32" widescreen CRT TV and $800 on a DVD player.

And some years after that the same money bought me what was then 'the latest thing' a 32" LCD tv.

4K will come down in price eventually too.

[Hector Berrebi]

Yes, the problem is in the delivery. I used to work for the cable company, and believe me, they are too busy lining CEO pockets to invest money into new technology. The whole cable infrastructure is rapidly deteriorating, and they're playing golf. Don't expect to get a perfect 4K image delivered to your home via cable any time soon. It's all about dollars and sense.

agree

most posts in this thread seem to ignore completely the broadcast/cable industry and how it operates... both technically and financially. the infrastructures to change for these dreams of 4k broadcast to really happen are immense. much more than having Matrox Avid and AjA work on it, as one post suggested.
nobody who controls the money valve in large broadcast or cable companies cares that much about resolution or quality... they never even managed (or cared enough) to overcome the 1080p broadcast challenge.

aside from that, you got the post production pipelines and workflows... and even the cameras. every broadcast has their specific cams, sports, news and live studio don't use the same equipment, and they sure don't often use REDs. this is a mammoth step seemingly to big for a slow dinosaur industry like global broadcast TV to make. no matter how many expensive or cheap 4K consumer sets are shown at CES. their real concerns are how fast the internet will forcefully merge into what used to be television.

and aside from that, I wouldn't want 4K to go mainstream that fast... first i want it as a cinema standard, then i want an affordable grading monitor... or several of them, then a few more years of delivering better-than-competition, stunning looking imagery, then maybe i'll start wanting 4k reality shows on my home TV set... maybe..

however, because it is a dream industry, and dreamers make it move forward... its worth mentioning that BBC and NHK are going to broadcast several 2012 Olympic events in UHD (that's 7,680 × 4,320... roughly 8K). NHK has been experimenting with UHD for several years now, and it is supposed to replace HD one day... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_H...ion_Television
http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/13/2...-coming-to-se/
look for NAB demos of UHD screens... looks quite impressive
http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/19/s...cd-with-16x-m/

watch out 4K... 4320p broadcast might just bite you in the ass

:)

[Christoffer Glans]

agree

most posts in this thread seem to ignore completely the broadcast/cable industry and how it operates... both technically and financially. the infrastructures to change for these dreams of 4k broadcast to really happen are immense. much more than having Matrox Avid and AjA work on it, as one post suggested.
nobody who controls the money valve in large broadcast or cable companies cares that much about resolution or quality... they never even managed (or cared enough) to overcome the 1080p broadcast challenge.

aside from that, you got the post production pipelines and workflows... and even the cameras. every broadcast has their specific cams, sports, news and live studio don't use the same equipment, and they sure don't often use REDs. this is a mammoth step seemingly to big for a slow dinosaur industry like global broadcast TV to make. no matter how many expensive or cheap 4K consumer sets are shown at CES. their real concerns are how fast the internet will forcefully merge into what used to be television.

and aside from that, I wouldn't want 4K to go mainstream that fast... first i want it as a cinema standard, then i want an affordable grading monitor... or several of them, then a few more years of delivering better-than-competition, stunning looking imagery, then maybe i'll start wanting 4k reality shows on my home TV set... maybe..

however, because it is a dream industry, and dreamers make it move forward... its worth mentioning that BBC and NHK are going to broadcast several 2012 Olympic events in UHD (that's 7,680 × 4,320... roughly 8K). NHK has been experimenting with UHD for several years now, and it is supposed to replace HD one day... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_H...ion_Television
http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/13/2...-coming-to-se/
look for NAB demos of UHD screens... looks quite impressive
http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/19/s...cd-with-16x-m/

watch out 4K... 4320p broadcast might just bite you in the ass

:)

At my day job (broadcast), we still work at 720x576 DV 420 25i (Avid). When I speak to them about HD material they think I mean uncompressed 720x576, not higher resolution.
At home I do post production towards filmmakers and myself at full HD uncompressed and in some cases 4K. Having to switch this mindset between my work days and other projects makes me feel the 4K revolution will never happen. And sweden is a country where there are almost no CRT's left anywhere... still even HD is far off.

The revolution will happen when people can buy a film in 4K and/or 3D for their home system at the same price as BluRay and DVD's. How long will it be before that happen?
Finish a film in 4K is good, for a master, for saving it into the future, but it will take a loooong time before 4K and 3D is even remotely close to a broad distribution format.