As with every January, technology journalists, gurus, nerds and others in the consumer electronics industry gathered in Las Vegas at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to showcase and explore their passion for the next trends in mass-market technologies. Once an E3-style show where new products were announced for imminent release, it has morphed into a showcase of future technology as the Internet has allowed big technology companies to choose times and locations more convenient to them to release their products.
CES tends to have a couple themes with respect to the concepts that are shown every year. Last year, 3D was a very prominent theme, with many display manufacturers showing off giant 3D televisions. This year, 3D took a backseat to 4K Ultra High-Definition TV (4K UHDTV), which has a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, or the equivalent of four 1080p HDTVs arranged two tall by two wide. The name comes not from its comparative resolution to 1080p, but from the width of the screen, which is almost 4000 pixels. This differs from the naming scheme used for current resolutions (480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p, etc.) which were named after the height component of the resolution. 8K UHDTV, with a resolution of 7680 x 4320, is a less prominent standard that is also gaining some support and had some presence at CES this year.
The concept of UHDTV is not new, as the Japanese broadcasting corporation NHK has been working on the standard since 2003. YouTube has also offered 4K UHDTV playback on its site since 2010. What has been seen in the last year is a proliferation of 4K UHDTVs and other 4K UHD displays and projectors ready for consumer use. This trend mirrors what we have seen in mobile devices and, to a lesser extent, some traditional computer displays. Most flagship phones from major phone manufacturers today have very high-resolutions, including some Android devices that have screens that can display upwards of a 1080p resolution on a 5-inch screen, something that was unheard of only a couple years ago. Apple’s high-end MacBook Pros are a notable example of recent trends towards higher resolution screens in laptop displays, and it’s highly rumoured that they, along with other manufacturers, will be bringing higher resolution desktop displays in the next couple years. When you look at the profound change brought by high-resolution displays on mobile phones, a higher resolution television seems like it would bring similar changes to television if it were cheap enough for the high-end television audience.
Unfortunately, while 4K UHDTVs are still in their infancy, the price of the ones shown at CES were rather expensive or had no price tag attached, leaving it up to attendees to guess how much more they would be paying for these high-resolution televisions. One glaring example of how expensive these screens are is LG’s 84-inch 4K UHDTV, which sells for 25 million won in Korea (equivalent to almost $23 500 in Canada). Compare that to the expensive Sharp AQUOS 80-inch 1080p LED TV, which retails for around $4000 here, but is clearly orders of magnitude cheaper. Sony has already released an 84-inch Bravia 4K UHDTV in North America, which sells for $25 000 but also has 3D.
The 80-inch televisions are fairly expensive compared to the average $700 40-inch 1080p LED HDTV here, and one would expect 4K UHDTVs to be a lot cheaper at this price point, but there are two factors that may prevent manufacturers from selling 4K televisions at this sort of price point. One is that television manufacturers sell HDTVs at very low margins or at a loss, due to the cutthroat nature of the television business, so they have been hoping to find ways to bring the cost of televisions back up to make it a more viable business. Having a new class of television enables them to find a reason to bring televisions back up to a price where they have good margins on their selling price, and 4K and 8K UHDTVs give them this opportunity. While they will likely be cheaper during their saturation point than they are right now, seeing 80-inch 4K UHDTVs at $4000 may not be a likely possibility.
The second primary factor is that at smaller screen sizes, televisions are positioned far enough from the viewer that the change from 1080p to 4K UHD is not very noticeable at low screen sizes, or at least not to the point where a viewer would feel obligated to upgrade as they did when HDTVs first came out. They certainly have no worthwhile effect on mobile screens, which already have high enough resolutions that pixels are arguably indistinguishable to most. Basing the ability to distinguish pixels off of Apple’s definition of a “Retina display”, Gizmodo Australia has noted that a 40-inch 1080p television at a distance of 1.5 metres should have pixels which are indistinguishable to the human eye, and a television is usually positioned at least that far away if it’s at that size. A 1080p screen smaller than that could be positioned closer and still be considered dense enough to have indistinguishable pixels.
Along with these price factors, any content delivered over the Internet in 4K UHD would be crippling to most Internet connections. 1080p video is already fairly hard to stream for most people and bandwidth caps are so low that people generally avoid streaming or downloading 1080p video for long amounts of time. 4K UHD video would likely be so hard to download that it would take hours to download a feature-length film and would be impractical with today’s Internet infrastructure. 8K UHD video, by extension, would be nearly impossible to deliver.
Despite these drawbacks, UHD standards could be useful in large computer displays and digital cinema. While TVs are positioned far from the viewer, desktop displays are typically very close to a person’s face and a 30-inch display with a 4K UHD resolution would probably be a good enough resolution that further improvements would cause negligible differences. Digital cinema projectors are typically 2K (the cinema equivalent term for 1080p, but wider) or 4K UHD already, but an 8K UHD projector would be able to give a level of detail similar to a 70mm IMAX film. Some cameras are already made to film content at 4K UHD resolutions, and hard drive space should be large enough over the next decade to begin supporting lengthy periods of 8K UHD filming. The prospect of 4K and 8K UHD content is enticing, but we still seem to be a few years away from letting it find its niche in consumer electronics and projection.
Leave a Reply