4K UHDTV Hardware On Display in Berlin, And On Sale In Korea 137
First the spec, and now the hardware: MrSeb writes "After five years of trying to convince us that 3D TVs are the future, it seems TV makers are finally ready to move on — to 4K UHDTV. At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, Sony, Toshiba, and LG are all showing off 84-inch 4K (3840×2160) TVs. These aren't just vaporware, either: LG's TV is on sale now in Korea (and later this month in the US), Sony's is due later this year, and Toshiba will follow in the new year. Be warned, though: all three will cost more than $20,000 when they go on sale in the US — oh, and there's still no 4K Blu-ray spec, and no such thing as 4K broadcast TV. In other display-related news, Panasonic is showing off a humongous 145-inch 8K (7680x4320) plasma TV, and some cute 20-inch 4K displays — but unfortunately neither are likely to find their way to your living room or office in the near future."
4k Monitor (Score:5, Insightful)
How about a 4k or 8k 27" monitor? They can market it as a TV if they want too.
Re:$20k, wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:4k Monitor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No 4k content, don't sign me up (Score:5, Insightful)
It just a matter of clean up, encoding and selling.
In the past HD and dvd was the final output target, but the back end went for 4/8k.
So there is a lot of great 4/8k material waiting, encoded, cleaned and audio ready.
The real trick is the new medium to sell it back.
Region coding, encryption, consumer codec payments, release dates and branding will be the fun part.
Can parts of the world with optical to the home do anything good in an expected movie watching time with this amount of data?
Terrestial transmission?
Or the dream of a new dvd/bluray like buy up craze with some strange cube of "data"?
No moving parts but expensive hyped adaptive networked realtime encryption.
A movie just for you for one night and not an hour longer.
If your internet fails, no movie for you?
Re:4k Monitor (Score:5, Insightful)
I concur. The killer thing is, you USED to be able to get normal-sized, high density computer displays and not pay a whole hell of a lot more for them versus similar sized LCD's. But then the HDTV thing happened and went mainstream, and now it's next to impossible to find a monitor that's any higher than 1920x1080, and a lot of the smaller 16:9 ones are much worse resolution that that, and lower resolutions than they were 4 or 5 years ago.
It truly, absolutely, makes no damn sense. Except that manufacturers just want to recycle cheap HDTV panels manufactured in bulk (often with lousy 6 or 7 bit color depth as well) and try to pass them off as "premium" computer monitors.
More modular displays (Score:5, Insightful)
I've only bought 4 TVs brand new since 1990, and they all worked fine when I got rid of 3 of them, including the 22 year old Trinitron. I got rid of them not because they broke, but because they were all functionally obsolete in some way.
I think what's needed isn't really longer life but coming up with some way to eliminate as much of the intelligence as possible from the display. Set top boxes kind of do this, but they're not really meant to be "display controllers" and don't perform some of the intelligence functions of the TV itself.
We need a "controller" and a "display" with an interface between them that is high resolution/bandwidth enough to handle at least 3 generations of future TV (ie, 4k, 8k, 16k..).
The controller should do everything that the built-in controller on a TV does now: switch between inputs, providing scaling, upconvert/downconvert for input sources to match the display itself, ATSC tuning (perhaps with cable card capability), P-I-P and other alternative display modes, provide basic audio functions and some of the "smart TV" functions you see cropping up now everywhere.
You can do this now with a combination of maybe a tuner with HDMI switching and a DVR, but it's kind of a compromise. Even a $1200 Pioneer receiver won't downconvert HDMI to a component-connected TV (or, more maddeningly, digital audio to analog).
With a controller designed to actually replace the intelligence and features within a TV, replacing your display would be easier and have no impact on the devices that send you video signals.