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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

4K for consumers is here

Well, like Jim has always said, 4K is here for us all. Really expensive right now though.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/blogs/digital-crave/dream-tvs-price-were-no-object-180943627.html

Jim, you are truly, a trailblazer. :cheers2:

I would be a little more specific and say that 4K monitors are available if you want to spend anywhere between $10,000 and $30,000 on a television monitor and don't care that there is no actual 4K material available to see on it.

My prediction is that this is a move much like HD and 3D before it. In the case of HD, more consumers than you probably want to believe still watch primarily SD content, often with stretched images, and believe it's HD because they're looking at an HD monitor. And with 3D, well, they started folding that capability into nearly all TV's in spite of the fact that home 3D has been by all accounts nearly completely rejected by the marketplace. Manufacturing devices with increased capabilities has very little to do with the content that is made available for them. I doubt that this will be much different going forward.
 
Yeah, but now we can stretch our SD content on a 4k screen too!!!:shocked:


I would be a little more specific and say that 4K monitors are available if you want to spend anywhere between $10,000 and $30,000 on a television monitor and don't care that there is no actual 4K material available to see on it.

My prediction is that this is a move much like HD and 3D before it. In the case of HD, more consumers than you probably want to believe still watch primarily SD content, often with stretched images, and believe it's HD because they're looking at an HD monitor. And with 3D, well, they started folding that capability into nearly all TV's in spite of the fact that home 3D has been by all accounts nearly completely rejected by the marketplace. Manufacturing devices with increased capabilities has very little to do with the content that is made available for them. I doubt that this will be much different going forward.
 
You would have to be insane to buy one of those 4k displays. The price is going to plummet within a year or two and the quality is mediocre at best. You would get far better image quality out of a good front projection or 1080p display. Everything I saw at NAB was really low contrast and bleh. 4K in the consumer space comes at a high cost both in price and quality.
 
The industry analyst firm IHS has this alarming story:

Study: 4K TVs to Bomb In Next 5 Years

I think the truth is that, just as it took color TV more than 10 years to get established and widespread (and roughly the same period of time for HD to take over), it's going to take some time for 4K to happen. Eventually, it will.

But I still say that even current 1920x1080 content has much, much too much compression in the broadcasts, cablecasts, and internet feeds I see today. We have a long way to go before bandwidth speeds allow really good HD, let alone good 4K.
 
I think the truth is that, just as it took color TV more than 10 years to get established and widespread (and roughly the same period of time for HD to take over), it's going to take some time for 4K to happen. Eventually, it will.


"Eventually" is the best catch-all phrase ever invented. Everything happens "eventually." "Eventually" we'll have 24K images, unlimited bandwidth, self driving cars, and hypersonic flight.

But I never confuse "eventually" with "anytime soon."
 
There's one big point of pressure though on televisions that I think will push them into higher resolutions: Cell Phones.

It sounds stupid but everyone is clamoring for HD cell phone displays, SuperHD laptop displays and SuperHD Tablets because of Apple. Once they start retooling more and more factories to handle high DPI displays it might end up being cheaper to just make 4k displays using the same designs than it is to try and create one incredibly low DPI design and one high DPI design.

We saw that with computer monitors. Old computer monitors were well above 1080p in resolution. Suddenly thanks to the TV market low cost LCDs popped up that were just TV displays in a computer monitor box. We might see the reverse where we have computer monitors in TV boxes.
 
"Eventually" is the best catch-all phrase ever invented. Everything happens "eventually." "Eventually" we'll have 24K images, unlimited bandwidth, self driving cars, and hypersonic flight.
I agree. I'm still waiting for magnetic air cars and rocket belts -- predicted at least 70 years ago.

But I do think 4K will eventually happen. 10 years, 15 years, 20 years... it'll happen in the home at some point. I think the first time I saw HiVision 1125 HD was around 1989-1990 at NAB. It was at least ten years before a practical consumer monitor was available, and then another 6-7 years after that before they were really affordable. And even today, one could make the argument that still, not all TV shows and commercials are 100% available in HD.

And HD is quite a bit easier to throw together than 4K.
 
Profitability of mass manufacturing TV sets is directly related to broadcast pipeline and standards.
Unlike manufacturing computer displays.
 
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