Digital Television & Video
4K television sets are now flooding the market while prices have dropped sharply. It still remains to be seen if the content will follow.
The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show was all about 4K/UHD. It looks like the technology won't be a flop like 3D. Sales are up and prices for sets are dropping. No hardware is going to be successful without good content and Amazon Prime and Netflix are currently streaming content in 4K. MVPDs will soon follow. Samsung has a deal with Comcast to deliver 4K programming.
With the growth of 4K/UHD, entertainment companies like Disney, Fox and Warner Brothers are teaming up with equipment makers such as Dolby, Sharp and Samsung to form the UHD Alliance. The alliance will work on standards as well as promoting the technology.
There has been a great deal of discussion about the next generation of video technology. While 4K and 8K formats have received a great deal of attention, many of us think that the next generation of video technology should focus on increased fidelity rather than increasing the number of pixels, especially when viewers can’t see the difference between HD and 4K video with most consumer screen sizes and viewing distances.
One alternate video format that has emerged is HDR (high dynamic range) video, which uses additional bandwidth to provide more detail about each picture element rather than providing more pixels. Attached is a short white paper introducing HDR. I strongly recommend that anyone working with video should be familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the different formats, as we are likely to see a “format war” sometime in the next few years.
(Side note: 4K should still be the preferred format for simulation and cinematic projection, and some combination of the two may eventually emerge. Stay tuned)
The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show was all about 4K/UHD. It looks like the technology won't be a flop like 3D. Sales are up and prices for sets are dropping. No hardware is going to be successful without good content and Amazon Prime and Netflix are currently streaming content in 4K. MVPDs will soon follow. Samsung has a deal with Comcast to deliver 4K programming.
With the growth of 4K/UHD, entertainment companies like Disney, Fox and Warner Brothers are teaming up with equipment makers such as Dolby, Sharp and Samsung to form the UHD Alliance. The alliance will work on standards as well as promoting the technology.
There has been a great deal of discussion about the next generation of video technology. While 4K and 8K formats have received a great deal of attention, many of us think that the next generation of video technology should focus on increased fidelity rather than increasing the number of pixels, especially when viewers can’t see the difference between HD and 4K video with most consumer screen sizes and viewing distances.
One alternate video format that has emerged is HDR (high dynamic range) video, which uses additional bandwidth to provide more detail about each picture element rather than providing more pixels. Attached is a short white paper introducing HDR. I strongly recommend that anyone working with video should be familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the different formats, as we are likely to see a “format war” sometime in the next few years.
(Side note: 4K should still be the preferred format for simulation and cinematic projection, and some combination of the two may eventually emerge. Stay tuned)