4K standard agreed....
call100
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...over the weekend. However, it will leave early adopters needing set top boxes in the future.
4K TV channels on the way
4K TV channels on the way
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call100
Posts: 7,278 call100
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As expected
And your point is?? The article is about the fact that they have actually agreed it, not the decision making process....^_^
The point is that it's EXACTLY what we expected, and was forecast by many - so not really exciting 'news'
https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreports/tr028.pdf
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Partial quotation is strictly forbidden.
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Here is some reasoning ,,,https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/events/webinar053_uhdtv/061213_uhdtv_webinar%20_final.pdf
To be fair these TV's weren't advertised as having the capability of receiving any over the air hevc broadcasts.
Nothing was framed to give the impression that it was supposed to be exciting. We knew it was being discussed but didn't know when the agreement would be signed. The post was purely an informative one.
Big clap for the know alls though if that's what you require to fill some empty space..:)
I don't blame the EBU either... it looks like pressure from TV manufacturers to get "something" out has won. Broadcasters who want to do it properly seem once again to have been ignored by the TV manufacturing industry, damn them. Just like with HD TV. But is anyone surprised? Not me.
As for the EBU's hope for a higher quality level of HDTV as well, I suspect that they can forget that too. Nothing should be done before UHD TV phase 2 is agreed and decoders are available in 2017/18 but you can bet your bottom dollar that phase 1 sets will be out in no time at all, promising the earth. It is all very disappointing and I for one hope that no broadcaster gets sucked into producing any phase 1 UHD TV services.
I agree that the industry should go straight to phase 2 ....
It is interesting to see how many people want to go to an inferior state..
Whether that is the TV manufactures , our transatlantic cousins who have fractional frame rates or those who want to make HD look better.
But the major European players see the need for more bits and more frames to make a wow image .... And an flexible and immersive sound ... Independent of loudspeaker positions,
The issue is if 10 bit and 100/120 Hz is the minimum what should the typical broadcast emission be... So that the the whole system can be made sufficiently future proof, ...
.... There is much talk of variable frame rates .....
I agree Dave and this is exactly what I've been warning against for some time - that governments wouldn't allow large numbers of consumers to buys sets that could be obsoleted or wouldn't be usable with a new 4K standard. In my opinion, it was inevitable a broadcasting standard would be agreed to prevent more incompatible sets being sold and it would be agreed without the EBU if they didn't come up with something.
The EBU will be very lucky if they can get Phase 2 accepted by governments and broadcasters if agreed unless they hurry up.
I know nothing of the EBU, but it does seem the wheels turn slowly from where I'm standing.
The best thing they can do, is get on and agree a Phase 2 standard before Phase 1 has a chance to be rolled out.
They're also going to lose control of 8K formats as well if they're not careful in my opinion.
Japan / China seem to dictate the speed of developments in TV technology not the EBU and with 8K broadcasts expected for the 2020 Olympics, you can guarantee consumer 8K sets will be hitting the shelves around 2017 / 2018 for early adopters (I imagine a flood of sets within Japan itself in around 2017). So again, in my opinion, the EBU need an 8K standard agreed before then.
I couldn't agree more, but it's the industry at fault here in my opinion.
How long have they known about 4K and 8K and yet they haven't agreed standards.
The broadcasters are not in control in this market anymore with regards to the pace of change in my opinion. The manufacturers and resellers are.
It's the broadcasting industry that needs to keep up.
The problem is that it is all cutting edge technology ... And at base band about 100 Gbit/sec.
And who makes either camera or display with BT 2020 colorimetry yet ??
It has taken a lot to persuade people that HDR is needed...
And the BBC R&D work on HFR is6 years old....
Basically as most broadcasters have been getting HD working.
They have not been looking at UHD , particularly that uhd1 came along ..
Everyone was looking at UHD 2 from the NHK SHV ..... With a launch date if 2022 to celebrate their centennial ...
But the Tokyo Olympics happened,,, and 4k as pushed by the CE industry,
This time they know they cannot afford to get it as wrong as HD was.
It all takes time ti get a standard and profile/shims that lasts as we all expect our hardware it have say 5 plus years life.
One could say that bt2020 which is getting on for three years old is the standard
just as BT 709 was in 1993 .... Some 9 years before regular ATSC transmissions .
If you want a view and a update - SMPTE have a webinar and you get a free slide pack
From Quad HD to UHDTV: Making the Difference if you are not a member it is $49 about £28
Members get it free - and SMPTE Membership is only $145 a year say £85 at the current good rate! - and you get all this - so perhaps it is worth joining if you are working in the industreies..... and it has meetings in the UK open to all. !
It certainly wouldn't fit anywhere near inside a house
But as for even broadcast 4K, it was always said by the BBC etc. that 4K was a 'professional only' format, and there were no plans to broadcast it
As is stands now, a Full HD set can be pretty huge in a house, and still give amazing quality - the big problem is the huge number of SD programmes still broadcast, which means you can't view from that close all the time.
I have a 1080 projector pointing at a ten foot screen,. When using it, which isn't too often, I sit about 10-12 feet away. With some material I'm sure it would benefit from being 4k / 8k, both for transmission (either direct or on the new version of blu-ray) and projection. I quite often refocus it to eight foot to get a clearer brighter picture.
Though 10 foot is a pretty big screen.
Well over 20 feet (10 feet high). Which is why there is no practical advantage in broadcasting to homes at 8K, 4K is the sensible upper limit (stately homes excepted).
They should stop this nonsensical talk about domestic 8K NOW and concentrate instead on selling to the public the benefits other than more pixels of UHD 1 phase 2. That is, increased dynamic range, wider colour gamut, higher frame rates and better audio, amongst other things.
Unlike spatial resolution, the above are independent of (or less dependent on) viewing distance and will therefore be useful to far more people including those who don't want giant TV sets cluttering up their rooms or having to sit at computer-screen-distances from them.
That's with a perfect source though. If you are picky, you will really notice any MPEG coding artefacts and deinterlacing artefacts (from a 1080i source) at that size/distance.
The fact that smaller pictures look brighter and clearer is a fundamental fact of most projectors though, even when the resolution is more than sufficient.
You don't need 8k. You would probably appreciate 4k + a brighter projector.
Cheers,
David.
Spot on.
No TVs support any of this yet though. Some of it is comparatively straightforward once the standards are decided, but full support for higher frame rates needs another cycle of Moore's Law.
Some people don't want to wait that long to make some money out of this. 'Twas ever thus.
Cheers,
David.
Well I'm afraid this is where there is a lot of rubbish floating about in my opinion.
There are those who say that the eye can't resolve the resolution so you can't see the difference.
There are those who say you need huge screens to notice it.
What I say is simple, look on Youtube for 8K demo videos and if you find the good ones, you realise that even when viewing it on a pc monitor at lower resolution and it's being filmed from a close distance, you CAN see a huge difference in sharpness,. detail and colour range (the latter of which especially results in a 3D effect).
One example video to start you off is here:
The 3D effect and depth is amazing and sharpness from only a couple of feet of viewing distance, similarly so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U7e_quvkPQ
Watch it at as high a resolution as you can. Ultimately, I've never seen HD look that detailed or that good. Nor have I ever seen it create a 3D effect like that - that is not a trick but a result of the expanded colour space plus extra sharpness. That for me is reason enough to disprove the theories that you can't see the difference or need to be sat 20 feet from a 100 inch screen etc.
NHK at a guess.
The Red Epic is 4K but I don't know anything about the colour space used.
However, again isn't this in the industries hands? Surely if NHK had been approached with a development request, something would have been possible by now.
I doubt very much you need to view that close Nigel. There are plenty of videos on Youtube where you can see a difference between 4k / 8K and HD even when viewing in HD resolution and from 10 or more feet.
As for SD, native SD needs removing from satellite in favour of 4K and HD native broadcasting with SD via a downscale. It isn't practicable to wait for SD boxes to die naturally as technology is moving too fast - boxes could last 10 years or more (there are working SD tv's of 1920's origin even still, and 4K is here now, and when 8K arrives circa 2018 -20, it's probable that even native HD broadcasting will have to cease as the transponders will need to switch over to HEVC, which means that only 8K / 4K native will be practicable with both HD and SD via downscaling (you can't broadcast 4 formats and in any case when HEVC is adopted new equipment will be needed for native HD HEVC decoding in any event, so it makes no sense to retain it when the same equipment can downscale to HD from 4K HEVC).
Do the newspaper test!
Seeing a 'difference' and getting much benefit are two VERY different things.
Even for 1080 resolution you have to view from VERY close to get full benefit, by definition higher resolution requires you to be much closer still.
I think a lot of the benefit is in the sharpness and expanded colour space rather than the detail of the individual pixel per se.
If you start looking for extra texture in a building side, eg. when the building is zoomed out, then yes you're might not spot that from 10 feet viewing distance. What having extra detail and smaller pixels does do though, is sharpen up the image in a way that I believe you don't get from artificial sharpening as the sharpness comes from having smaller pixels rather than making the edges of each more defined as with artificial sharpening, and that results in what appears to me to be a more lifelike picture.
The problem there being it looks better "even when viewing it on a pc monitor at lower resolution" due to it being a tech demo with very high bitrates to prove a point. Back in the real world, we live in a country where not only has HD been watered down from 1920x1080 @ 15-18MB/s to 1440x1080 @ 6-7MB/s, but they can't even broadcast 720x576 @ 3-4MB/s SD without nerfing it to 544x576 @ 1.5MB/s bitrates (even before HD came along...) Anyone who thinks 4k is going to bring some magic panacea of high-bitrate 4-8k broadcasting is ludicrously naive given the "race to the bottom" history of SD/HD TV, DAB, etc, bitrate nerfing and general "pile it high, sell it cheap" broadcaster attitude in the UK (which sadly doesn't look to be changing anytime soon...)
My prediction : What's going to happen to any 4K UK channel is the same that's happened to literally every single digital SD & HD channel on every single platform (cable, DVB-T, DVB-S, DAB, etc) - it'll be introduced at a high bitrate, which will then be promptly reduced down by 66-75% 6-12 months later to squeeze in more channels. End result = it'll end up looking no better than 1080p at its earlier high bitrates due to over-compression...
Nowhere near enough bandwidth for 100% HD even without 4k. SD isn't going to "die naturally" at all anytime soon (neither is DVD) no matter how much a tiny number of enthusiasts want it to hype The Next Big Thing That Needs Selling After 3D Ran Out Of Steam (tm). Broadcasters don't particularly want 4k unless they can charge an arm and a leg for premium subscriptions due to obviously much higher bandwidth costs (a finite resource). Even today only half of Sky subscribers care about the HD pack ("family bundle") over the "variety bundle" for resolution alone and the price reduction of that from £10 to £5 to slow the formerly "HD pack" high churn proves people aren't willing to pay very much on average. And the difference between SD and HD on most sets is far greater than HD & 4k to the average person.
Again the problem is the 1080p version of that clip is a low 4MB/s with very clear bandwidth starvation causing eg, ringing artifacts around her outstretched hand at 5s and a general lack of definition (macroblocks on the wooden stand, lack of definition on her face not due to res but bitrate). Most Blu-Ray's look far better than that like for like due to 4-5x the bitrate. Even the 4k version downscaled to 1080p doesn't look that spectacular vs the average Blu-Ray due to Youtube compression. Certainly nothing I'd pay a premium for (and I'm as geeky as they come).
A lot of placebo out there at the moment & it's a natural contradiction - sit too close to a large screen and you notice the compression. Sit further away and the resolution difference becomes extremely minimal. About the only thing you can do a serious "like for like" with is uncompressed gaming footage on a 4K gaming PC where half the detail isn't smudged out by high Youtube compression, and even then half of today's "next gen" console gamers can't tell 720p vs 900p vs 1080p on an average sized 30-46" 1080p TV from 8-10ft away...
I'm not bashing 4k, but I do think a lot of enthusiasts don't see that a lot of average people with average sized TV sets sitting at normal 8-10ft view distances see the manufactured hype more like the video equivalent of DVD-Audio / SACD vs CD than "Blu-Ray vs DVD reloaded"...