Ultra High Definition in your living room!

[Warren Kawamoto]

LG is making these available to the public masses whether you're ready or not
LG kicks off CES with 55-inch 'ultra-HD' TV - Hawaii News - Honolulu Star-Advertiser

[Kyle Root]

Looks like you'll need to get one of these new Sony 4K Handycams to shoot with too!

Sony's 4K Handycam and HXR-IFR5 4K Interface Unit prototypes eyes-on

4K the future is now.

LOL

[Lee Mullen]

$10k? No thanks. Happy with my 1080 to watch junk on.

[Shaun Roemich]

Saw an 80" Sony 4k set just after Christmas in the Sony store... "only" $25,000

Looked pretty amazing though...

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

From $25K to $10K...that's a huge jump. So, by the next CES we might see one in the $2K range!

[Mark Kenfield]

Whilst 90% of the content I watch on my 50" Plasma remains in standard definition, and the majority of the HD content I watch is poorly encoded. I can't really see the point in upgrading to UHD for a long, long, long time.

I'd be perfectly happy if we could just get nice quality HD content to my HDTV, but that doesn't seem to be happening any time soon.

[Glen Vandermolen]

I want that 4K Handicam! I'll work on getting a home 4K monitor..one day.

[Noa Put]

4K is only usefull if you have very large screens, it also has to fit in your living room, I still have a 32 inch lcd tv that wouldn"t benefit from 4k if it would have that resolution. It will at least take 5 more years before I upgrade to anything more then 1080p and I"m sure most of my clients will take even more years to do the same. Some of my work ends up on the internet and currently 720p is more then sufficient for the following years. I prefer better content over more resolution any day.

[Monday Isa]

There are benefits to down-converting 4K to 1080P. I'm looking forward to seeing footage and trying that out. I'd imagine NAB well hear more about it.

[Gints Klimanis]

4K is very useful for a large screen in a smaller room. What room doesn't have 84" diagonal of wall space ? Sell the wall-sized prints and burn all of those dusty books in the tall shelves. But at 84" for the Sony, I'm starting to think more about a 4K projector to carry to 100+". Now, if the cable and streaming providers ever got into anything better than 1280x720 ... Compression artifacts pollute today's 2K TV channels unless you watch a real DVD or BluRay.

[David Heath]

Screen size is irrelevant in isolation - the fact that's relevant is viewing angle. So if viewed relatively close (computer monitor type distance) the physical size of the screen doesn't have to be very large at all.

A UK study showed that here the typical viewing distance for a normal living room is just under 3 metres, largely down to average room sizes. I think if that is assumed, 1080 starts to show a clear advantage over 720 at around 40" and above, and 4k starts to show a difference around 65" and above. Initially 720 was assumed "good enough" as it was based on screens in the home not being likely to be more than about 37". Technology moved far faster than predicted, screens of 42"-46" became commonplace very soon after - hence the general HD standardisation on 1080 systems for broadcast.

I see 4k as eventually becoming the norm for much pro acquisition, and probably for such as cinema viewing as well. I'm far more sceptical of it being a broadcast standard any time soon, other than as a niche - I'd expect an (1080) HD/SD mix to be the case for quite a few years to come, the percentage of HD gradually increasing.

[Walt Stagner]

Technology is moving at light speed because Pana, Sony, LG, et al are all following the the software model of how to make $....sell upgrades and HOPE that enough people will go for it.

[Roger Keay]

Originally Posted by David Heath

...I see 4k as eventually becoming the norm for much pro acquisition, and probably for such as cinema viewing as well. I'm far more sceptical of it being a broadcast standard any time soon, other than as a niche - I'd expect an (1080) HD/SD mix to be the case for quite a few years to come, the percentage of HD gradually increasing.

The level of HD availability in the UK seems significantly lower than in North America. Wide screen SD was never deployed here so the natural progression was directly from 4:3 SD to HD. As a result, every significantly viewed TV service in North America is available in HD however not all distributors have every service in the HD version. SD production seems to have disappeared except for small market TV stations that have yet to convert local news programming to HD.

I don't think that 4K will get a lot of traction for several years as the additional cost and hassle of higher data volumes won't be justified except for products with a long shelf life. The distribution mechanism will be interesting - traditional channel, terrestrial distributor video-on-demand or over-the-top IP video services are all possibilities. I noticed that YouTube will support 4K. The model might be initial niche market service by over-the-top IP video followed by terrestrial distributor VOD/PPV and eventually movie and sports channels. The next generation high efficiency video codec will probably be needed to get the stream sizes down to manageable proportions.

[Gints Klimanis]

I agree with the obstacles to delivering 4K video content. Even Sony is not showing a 4K disk player and instead includes a computer some movies stored on a hard drive.

I'm waiting for US cable programming to catch up to real HD. Many cable channels are faux HD : the channel is labeled HD, the screen format includes the 16:9 aspect ratio yet the quality of the video is less than that of the source DVD.

4K TVs will be appealing to those using the TV as a game/computer and photo display device. Given the proliferation of 60-73" rear-projection monstrosities over the last decade, I doubt space will be an issue for those customers. They will make room for the 80+" slender upgrades. In the corporate world,surely the 60-80" wall-mounted HDTVs will be replaced with 4K TVs. Smaller conference rooms continue to use a projector.

[Warren Kawamoto]

I saw my first UHD picture on a big monitor at NAB, several years ago. It was like looking out a window. No visible pixels, crystal clear picture. However, I think brides would cringe....because you would be able to see every wrinkle and imperfection on her face, forever and ever.