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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 :)

Playstation 4 will support 4K gaming

Mark, if you think movie viewing is limited to theaters, you are missing the point.

Mike, how is viewing a movie on a laptop for two hours any different than reading articles or surfing forum posts for 2 hours?
 
Might as well add that 16k is the only format I'm willing to sit through.

Seriously--

I've seen many thousands of films.

I have never, ever seen a 4K projected film in my entire life. They don't exist where I live.

The 4k tempest in a teapot debate is completely irrelevant to my life. Absolutely no impact whatsoever. I could die tomorrow without ever sitting through any 4K film. And I couldn't care less. Guess what -- neither could most of the rest of the world.

You know what I like? Film. I like grain. I like analog. I like the feel of it, the natural, enveloping world that is almost never achieved digitally to the same depth. The films that have affected me the deepest have all been shot on that glorious celluloid. Go figure. There's something captivating about that subconscious grain texture flickering by at 24P that elicits a kind of trance dream state. I may even like 16mm better than 35mm, with projects like The Wrestler, Black Swan and Moonrise Kingdom jumping immediately to mind. I want a movie to feel like a movie, not a video game with super clean, plastic textured imagery that often can't be distinguished from CGI.

I can't even think of a digital production that's really affected me, on a gut level. Any suggestions? (Please don't say Prometheus. What a disappointment.)
 
Firstly, there is no doubt that 4K is coming to consumers in the very near future. Intel has announced that most premium laptops above 15 inches will feature a 3840x2160 display.

But 4K will not benefit everyone equally. It depends on the viewing environment and the content. Specifically, viewing environment is a function of screen size and viewing distance, while by content what matters is high frequency detail.

Leaving aside productivity applications and considering consumption, it is text that stands to improve the most. Another big gainer is gaming. Assuming developers improve texture resolution, the visuals are very detailed and the viewing distance is usually small (PC gaming). While DirectX 11 games have very effective anti-aliasing algorithms nowadays, a high enough pixel density will effectively kill aliasing. AMD's Radeon HD 7000 cards are ready for 4K and I would expect gamers to swiftly adopt high resolution panels.

Still photographs also stand to gain from 4K. It is much more complicated when it comes to cinema, however, particularly modern cinema. The general trend in a vast majority of Hollywood cinema seems shallow focus close-ups, extremely fast cutting, overly dynamic cameras smearing detail with motion blur and so on. The only places I see detailed wide shots are to impress the audience with scope-showing production design, a great landscape or CGI work. Even so, these shots are few and far between, last mere seconds and are captured by a moving camera juddering along at 24 frames per second. Yes, we are used to it, but coming from 60 fps content watching intensified continuity / chaos cinema at 24 fps is downright jarring, if not nauseating. Personally, then, I would like to see Hollywood move to 48 fps before 4K.

However, cinema is vast, and there are plenty of films that still revolve around immaculate mise-en-scene and extremely detailed shots. Play Time was shot on 65mm for a reason - 35mm was simply not enough to capture the detai for those awesome compositions. The compositions also linger long enough to register. In essence, Tati's visual style is in complete contrast to the one described in the previous paragraph. It is no surprise that Tom is pushing for 4K, but movies with a visual style revolving around detailed compositions lasting long enough to appreciate are in 2012 few and far between. Of course, avoiding detail in these ways, or any other, is a very valid creative choice.

The other aspect is the exhibition environment. Between poor projection and a general trend to internet streaming on mobile devices with small screens (although ironically the field of view is still wider than viewing TV from several feet away), resolution starts to matter even less.

For those of us who prefer to sit 3 feet away from a 27-30 inch monitor, 4K cannot come soon enough, however. Particularly if we play (or should I say, experience) games.

Of course, resolution is as always just one factor. The Rec.2020 specs call for 10-bit or 12-bit display (most displays will end up being 8-bit + AFRC, but that is still a vast improvement as 99% current displays are 6-bit), a much wider colour gamut (academic, I don't see a consumer panel matching those anytime soon). OLED panels are also incoming, which will finally put a rest to the black level problem.

Excuse the rather haphazard nature of this post. I also failed to mention that adoption of 4K TVs will not be as swift (although of course not "decades"). As a closing note, I do love NHK's Super Hi Vision. It can be incredibly immersive, and from less than 1x picture height viewing distance even 4K is not good enough. Of course, you wouldn't want to watch a lot of material in that kind of viewing environment, neither is it suitable for all content, but with the right content it can be quite an experience.
 
Tom Lowe said:
how is viewing a movie on a laptop for two hours any different than reading articles or surfing forum posts for 2 hours?
Click to expand...

If you don't mind stepping in...these factors may be helpful:

- Typical computer usage is based on "hand tool" type of usage and focus at roughly hand distance, where perception is optimised for focusing on specific type of details
- Longer exposure to short distance focusing affects the eye lens accomodation range and by that focusing flexibility
- Surfing + forum etc. are interactive activities where user chooses and partially predicts content, thus having faster ability to perceive the specific content on a short focusing distance
- Surf/forum is more two-dimensional and data centric, movie watching is the experience of motion through space, more accurately represented on a longer distance
- Typical computer usage contains multiple short unconscious pauses and focusing somewhere else, unlike uninterrupted movie watching
- Watching a movie on a computer screen is not replacing typical computer usage, but adding time spent focusing on a short distance
- Computer screen slams the cornea with higher, often unnatural light values
- Electric field distance to body (monitor + computer)
 
Tom Lowe said:
Mark, if you think movie viewing is limited to theaters, you are missing the point.

Mike, how is viewing a movie on a laptop for two hours any different than reading articles or surfing forum posts for 2 hours?
Click to expand...

It's different in a number of ways, but the bottom line is that all of those activities will likely affect your vision adversely over the years. The same way that the generations born in the 80's and later are likely to experience considerably more hearing loss than those born earlier (due to extended listening to music at loud volumes on headphones), they are also likely to experience more vision loss due to activities like the ones you just mentioned. That's not a warning, it's an observation.

"cool != good." At least not all of the time, especially in the long term.
 
Just my personal opinion, and I'm as much of a resolution freak as Tom, but I *HATE* watching movies on small screens. I want resolution, I want sharp detail. I don't want to see pixels. And I want a huge screen to watch it on.
 
I concur with Jeff though I also enjoy the small-screen aspect of portable entertainment like a notebook screen (17-inch FTW). I actually have a Blu-Ray player connected to my 27-inch 1080p desktop monitor so I can use it and switch back and forth between it and my PC as needed and watch many movies this way.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Just my personal opinion, and I'm as much of a resolution freak as Tom, but I *HATE* watching movies on small screens. I want resolution, I want sharp detail. I don't want to see pixels. And I want a huge screen to watch it on.
Click to expand...

Yup, no doubt in my mind that the cinema screen is the best experience for movie watching.
 
Well keep in mind I have been living in a truck for the last couple of years, so my options have been limited! I do enjoy watching 1080p films on my 17" laptop.

But I am planning to build a home theater with the Sony 4K projector soon, with like a 15-foot screen. Watching Peter Chang's 4K projector was a great experience!
 
Tom, I've been doing tons of research and in person testing of the various projector manufacturers as I'm getting my movie theater ready to open. Personally, the Sony's are my least favorite in terms of image quality. They continue to suffer from milky blacks when compared with any of the three companies (Christie, NEC, Barco) that are using TI's DLP chips. I would definitely take a look at what the DLP guys have before dropping 80k+ into a projector/server.
 
The Sony 4K projector I am talking about is only $20K. I cannot afford those bigger ones for my house.

Here is a picture of Peter's setup:

edcdance.jpg
 
Haha. Yeah, Tom, living in a truck has its disadvantages. Looks like the new digs in Dubai should cure a lot of that. ;)

I agree with Andrew about the Sony projectors. The LCOS systems are milky and black/shadow detail really suffers. Unfortunately, they have the best resolution at the moment until the new laser units (like RED's) hit the market. The DLPs have superior color rendition and much better blacks, the "rainbow" effects have mostly been eliminated on the latest systems, it's rare that I see them and I'm highly sensitive to it. Where the DLP units currently suffer is they're "wobulated". This gives an artificial resolution boost while incurring some spatial and temporal distortion on the image. Effectively, the DMD unit rocks side to side as each frame is scanned so that many pixels/elements are used twice in the scan to boost the resolution. Full-raster 3840x2160 DMD systems are in testing now, but we probably won't see them in a commercial product for at least another 6 months.

I too am building a theatre / coloring room with the intent of adding a 4K projector. I've been talking about building it for the past 2+ years and it's finally time. I have my remodel permits in hand and will be starting in about 20 days when my schedule clears a bit. I have a 1080p JVC projector that was in a corporate installation and pulled recently and I'm going to install that in the interim until I decide which 4K projector to go with. My money is betting on RED at this point, but so far we haven't seen the goods. I was at RED Studios two weeks ago and in their theatre they had the RED projector, the Sony 4K and a Christie. Only saw the Sony one operate. The RED projector showing at NAB was a bit hard to quantify. It was running at 1/4 resolution and didn't have the proper screen to eliminate ghosting with the 3D. On the other hand, I thought the color rendition and overall range was excellent.
 
I'm still hoping that Red goes for DCI certification. Our digital roll-out will be multi-phased and I would love to stick the Red projector in our three smaller houses (28ft wide screens) where it just doesn't make sense to have the bigger units.
 
I think a key component of this is economies of scale in R & D, manufacturing, distribution, etc to drive the price down enough to push beyond the early adopters, like a lot of technologies of this type. Now that Blu-Ray players are under $100 (just saw one for $39 at Frys) and still play legacy DVDs they have become an easy choice for consumers, when they were $300 plus 2 years ago, and the number of HDTVs in the wild was lower, it was a much more uphill battle.

I do agree that the size of most people's primary viewing rooms and the distance they sit from the display is relatively static (couch, coffee table, TV) at roughly 7 to 12 feet from the screen. As more 50" plus displays drop below the $1,000 price point then the math on some of the human vision issues noted by others starts to change.

The other big piece is a delivery system that can handle 4K motion content at decent quality levels. I would contend that one of the main reasons so few people note the difference between 720P and 1080i is the amount of compression applied by the distributors (yes, the interlace vs progressive factor matters as well). FWIW I also think that the traditional "broadcast" distributors really showed a lack of vision (pun intended) when they decided to cram more channels down the same pipe, quality be damned, without realizing they were frittering away the one thing that actually differentiated them from downloaded video - picture quality. Yes, my Direct TV image is better than Hulu but not by nearly as much as it should be. My point is, if 4K material gets pummeled by the distribution architecture then selling people on its superiority to 1080 will be a lot tougher.

The other tipping point I see is that when the cost of mastering in 4K is only slightly more than 1080/2K then many producers will buy into the concept of extending the shelf life of their assets. As long as that gap is substantial, I believe the realities of making a profit on the immediate deliverable will sharply limit the number of takers. While folks like Tom and I will sweat blood for 4K the economics needed to support it are still minimal which is a classic Catch-22. How do you build a robust market for 4K devices without content? How do you offset the extra cost of the creation of 4K content without a extant revenue stream?

The good news is that the CE companies see 4K as a mechanism to speed up the replacement cycle of the products they sell (similar to why they embraced 3D). We 4K zealots are just secondary beneficiaries of their avarice ;-)

Cheers - #19
 
AndrewThomas said:
Tom, I've been doing tons of research and in person testing of the various projector manufacturers as I'm getting my movie theater ready to open. Personally, the Sony's are my least favorite in terms of image quality. They continue to suffer from milky blacks when compared with any of the three companies (Christie, NEC, Barco) that are using TI's DLP chips. I would definitely take a look at what the DLP guys have before dropping 80k+ into a projector/server.
Click to expand...

You're talking about commercial cinema projectors which tend to top out at around 2,000:1 on/off contrast. Black levels are "milky" compared to the Sony 4K home projector or any of the JVC's, which have much higher native contrast (up to 120,000:1 on the JVC RS65). In the home arena, LCoS has dominated DLP for years in terms of putting out the deepest blacks and the most cinematic image - just take a look on AVS Forum.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
I agree with Andrew about the Sony projectors. The LCOS systems are milky and black/shadow detail really suffers. Unfortunately, they have the best resolution at the moment until the new laser units (like RED's) hit the market. The DLPs have superior color rendition and much better blacks, the "rainbow" effects have mostly been eliminated on the latest systems, it's rare that I see them and I'm highly sensitive to it. Where the DLP units currently suffer is they're "wobulated". This gives an artificial resolution boost while incurring some spatial and temporal distortion on the image. Effectively, the DMD unit rocks side to side as each frame is scanned so that many pixels/elements are used twice in the scan to boost the resolution. Full-raster 3840x2160 DMD systems are in testing now, but we probably won't see them in a commercial product for at least another 6 months.

I too am building a theatre / coloring room with the intent of adding a 4K projector. I've been talking about building it for the past 2+ years and it's finally time. I have my remodel permits in hand and will be starting in about 20 days when my schedule clears a bit. I have a 1080p JVC projector that was in a corporate installation and pulled recently and I'm going to install that in the interim until I decide which 4K projector to go with. My money is betting on RED at this point, but so far we haven't seen the goods. I was at RED Studios two weeks ago and in their theatre they had the RED projector, the Sony 4K and a Christie. Only saw the Sony one operate. The RED projector showing at NAB was a bit hard to quantify. It was running at 1/4 resolution and didn't have the proper screen to eliminate ghosting with the 3D. On the other hand, I thought the color rendition and overall range was excellent.
Click to expand...

You guys obviously have not seen the new Sony 4K VPL-VW1000.
The native on/off contrast is over 10,000:1 and coupled with a dynamic iris that is seldom noticeable, it is very competitive with the top JVC's.
The optics are top notch, and it cranks out 2000 lumens.
It is the best projector I have seen in 15 years of home theater at any price, and that includes $50K+ Sim2 DLP projectors and commercial units. Check the reviews. An ISF calibrator who calibrates projectors for the major studios said this Sony is quickly becoming popular as a reference projector. The color is spot on.
Many have already replaced their Sim2's with this Sony. One guy even replaced his dual commercial Barco 4K projectors with the Sony. Yes, it's that good. It is selling like hotcakes. Sony has barely been able to keep up with demand since its release.
The Sony 4K at RED is a commercial unit, not the new VW1000.
The 3D on the VW1000 is also some of the best projected 3D I've seen.
Not to mention the 4K upscaling engine "Reality Creation" is pretty stunning technology (and apparently costs $5,000 per unit to implement) and makes blu-rays look better than ever.
 
Peter Chang said:
You're talking about commercial cinema projectors which tend to top out at around 2,000:1 on/off contrast. Black levels are "milky" compared to the Sony 4K home projector or any of the JVC's, which have much higher native contrast (up to 120,000:1 on the JVC RS65). In the home arena, LCoS has dominated DLP for years in terms of putting out the deepest blacks and the most cinematic image - just take a look on AVS Forum.
Click to expand...

*yawn*

There is a reason that a lot of the guys in the 20k+ forum are moving to DCI certified D-Cinema units from consumer products like the JVC (admittedly excellent line) projectors, and these aren't people on the BH circuit so DCI compliance isn't a concern...
 
AndrewThomas said:
*yawn*

There is a reason that a lot of the guys in the 20k+ forum are moving to DCI certified D-Cinema units from consumer products like the JVC (admittedly excellent line) projectors, and these aren't people on the BH circuit so DCI compliance isn't a concern...
Click to expand...

That reason is primarily light output for 20ft+ screens. And even then, one of the guys in the 20K+ forum who owns dual Barco 4K's and a 23ft wide screen opted to instead use the "consumer" Sony VW1000 as his main projector, due to image quality.
 
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