4K TV Article

lightstrum said:
"Realistic place"? When people look at Hd the say that looks good. When they look at 4k they say that looks real.
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Who does? Who has said this, and where?

I must admit, I've never seen anyone else argue that 4K is going to sweep the consumer world because people think it looks incandescently "real."

And it's really just a variation on the same things said about HD.


Your right- they could give a s*%t, but they will love it and buy it because it is real.
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They have to care in order to buy it. They don't.


Oh and millions just bought HD? 7 Billion on the planet could care less and want what is real to them.
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The people who are buying TVs are the ones who matter here. If you're not buying a TV, what difference does your preference make?
 
joe1946 said:
I guess if the old school media industry wants to just sit on their butts with 720p/1080i then companies like Netflix are going to have the 4K pie all to themselves because there will be millions of 4K display devices sold in the next few years.
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We have Netflix and the current quality of HD streaming to our set leaves a lot to be desired. I can't imaging a 4K signal being streamed down the same bandwidth pipe being any better.
 
I guess Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart and every other store should just close their TV department because the average consumer just bought a new TV and won't be looking to replace what they have for a while.
 
joe1946 said:
I guess Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart and every other store should just close their TV department because the average consumer just bought a new TV and won't be looking to replace what they have for a while.
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Nice snark, but it entirely misses the point of what I said.
 
David W. Jones said:
We have Netflix and the current quality of HD streaming to our set leaves a lot to be desired. I can't imaging a 4K signal being streamed down the same bandwidth pipe being any better.
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That is your bandwidth problem, do you think everyone has a bandwidth problem ? There are 100 million Windows XP users out there that are in for a shock after April 8th but at least they could still watch Lawrence Welk reruns on their old TVs.
 
joe1946 said:
That is your bandwidth problem, do you think everyone has a bandwidth problem ? There are 100 million Windows XP users out there that are in for a shock after April 8th but at least they could still watch Lawrence Welk reruns on their old TVs.
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Take a step back, Joe. The belittling sarcasm is getting a little thick. People have differing opinions for legitimate reasons. David didn't say anything which warranted this kind of response.
 
All this talk of bandwidth and not being able to get 4k in the first place is kind of irrelevant to most consumers.
In Aus we have 6 free to air TV networks (I've never had pay TV, so i cant tell you anything about that).
1 of them is a low budget community station that had to work it's ass off just to get a digital license before analog went off the air, so i wont count that.
The other 5 each have 4 channels right now. From all those channels each Network is so slack and cheap that they only have 1 out of the 4 in HD, all the rest are still SD.
This however doesn't stop the Shops from now trying to sell 4k, and the people who have the money buying them. Nor me walking in and saying "wow that looks good"! Even though it's a built in, look how good this is, bit of video.

So God knows how long it will take for me to get the full benefit of 4k, but i will probably hold off on a new TV until the 4k goes down in price, and i will get one of them rather than pay a couple of hundred less for another, better quality than i have right now HD.
As a result of how much less TV i watch now. If my current TV stop's working, I will probably get a cheap HD for the time being, rather than another expensive one, and get a good 4k further down the track. I personally think that 4k will be soon enough (not to mention how much faster the years seem to be going now :() to make holding off worthwhile. Even from the point of getting a new camera (if i can).
 
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Mark Williams said:
Interesting article on 4K TVs. Apparently they have surpassed the limits of human vision. "And consumers will soon realize that they aren't seeing much, if any, visual resolution and sharpness improvements," Soneira continued. The sets will likely be better than today's in other ways, he noted, "but the higher pixel count will not be the reason."
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Thing is the way we interact with screens these days. 4K is a much better experience than HD or SD. However, movies and content we watch from our couches needn't be more than 720p for the most part.

Displaying family photos on a 50inch 4k screen? priceless.
 
David Jimerson said:
I hope current players are able to have a downloadable firmware upgrade to handle it. Having to buy a whole new player would slow things even further.
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That's what people have speculated but obviously no one knows for sure. Since the codecs won't change and from the start of Blu-ray triple layered (and I think even quad layered) discs were talked about I would be surprised if a whole new player was required.

Bassman2003 said:
Remember all of the people (camera makers) telling us to "future proof" our work by upgrading to HD? How effective was upselling HD on technical merits when we came out of the SD era for you? For me it has been a huge frustration because people just did not buy into Blu-ray. 4K does have any physical medium yet and the internet is well, the internet. Business' want something that just works (small windows and bitrates) and selling anything people have to go download is just not a good business model.

I sound like a Debbie Downer on 4k but from my point of view HD has not turned into the best business move (as so much is still delivered on DVD for me) and a 4k investment holds the same or greater risk at the moment. I still want to see how light sensitive the first round of 4k video cameras (not large sensor cameras) will be before I make a judgement though.
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It sucks that HD production wasn't a profitable venture for you but for many people it was. I've been working in HD at various companies since 2004-ish. Back then it was still mostly SD with only the bigger clients paying for HD but by 2006/2007 I was at a web company and most of our productions were being done in HD. Of course on the complete opposite end of the spectrum in 2012 "Looking for Lenny" (the doc in my sig which I edited) came out on cable/sat VOD and streaming in the US (it had already aired in some over seas territories) and it was in SD.

David Jimerson said:
For acquisition, there is truth to this.

For the end-viewer consumer, nahhh. They don't care about anything you say here.
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But they do care about what Mr. Jones next door has and what the marketing people have to day (whether they admit it or not). In a number of years once the prices come down, more content is available and they hype-machine hits the mainstream full force people will get the itch to buy something new and shiny because, well, people like buying things that are new and shiny. Hell, our cell phones will probably be shooting 4k by then and people will be complaining that they don't have a 4k TV to show their 4k cell phone videos on. lol


Bassman2003 said:
4k for feature film is a reality. True, no arguments. But for the rest of the media industry, well that is a large entity. Saying HD is the past is just not true. This kind of thinking will lead to spending a lot of money in areas that do not warrant the investment. Broadcast will not change from 720p/1080i anytime soon outside of a few high profile events in tandem with the HD broadcast. Simple matter of bandwidth. The pipes are already full. The quality of DirecTV has goine down since the HD era began as they lower the bitrate to fit more channels and features. H.265 is on the way but will it put a 4k channel in the same space as an HD channel? Everybody needs to buy new cameras and lenses? Really, just when the HD stuff has the dust settled down? I don't see it on a large scale. Television advertising is not what it used to be outside of live sports.
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Broadcast will probably be last to the 4k game because of the difficulty and cost of upgrading all the broadcasting equipment again. It won't be as bad as the analog to digital switch but it won't be pretty either. Streaming, on the other hand, is just data flowing down a dumb pipe and there are streaming companies like Amazon, Netflix and YouTube that are champing at the bit to win viewers away from their 'old media' brethren. Time Warner and Comcast (the two biggest cable companies in the US which also happen to be some of the biggest content creators too) are talking 4k and that makes things even more interesting.

David W. Jones said:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014...ntent-owners-cant-afford-bandwidth-costs.html
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That article was previously posted and i responded to it in post #76. My response was basically that the article makes good points but it only looks 12-18 months into the future which is exceedingly short sighted, IMO. You aren't going to see wholesale changes in such a short amount of time, but look 5, 6 or 7 years down the line and I think that's plenty of time for the variables to settle down to make way for the arrival of 4k into the mainstream.

-Andrew
 
lightstrum said:
"Realistic place"? When people look at Hd they say that looks good. When they look at 4k they say that looks real. Yes they are not looking at 4k or acquisition or anything "pro". They are acknowledging reality in the moment. It is the same mistake hi fi crazy guys make ( I am one of them ) that people listen to sound like they do or care, no- people listen to music. Your right- they could give a s*%t, but they will love it and buy it because it is real. And that is the difference. Millions of years of evolution have given us these particular eyeballs and 4k is perceived as real.
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I think you are contradicting yourself here, Sound is real, music is art, abstraction, etc... story telling, lighting, character for movies. People don't listen to music because the sound of a guitar or battery, sounds like it. It is the harmony and most of the time it is modified by mixers etc to sound like what the producers and artist want it to sound. In fact the music industry went the way of convenience rather than quality in the consumer world. I remember the days people where discussing the Future after CD. Remember those days, what did happen can be resumed in three word... MP3. What will happens is that people always react until a certain threshold, once it is good enough, then other aspect like convenience will have a very big part in their choice. Talking about movie experience, for the last 5 years I have been watching movies projected digitally at 2k on some very big screen and I guess 99% of the world also has been doing this. So I don't think that 4k is the movie experience most of us have been looking at the last 4/5 years. Talking about real, I don't want reality when I watch a movie, I want to be transported in other world other dimension with some super storyline and character playing it. The same reality that got so much criticism for the hobbit.

As I said before, 4k TV set will come as a default, they will be selling just a couple hundred dollar more than their 1080p counterparts because consumers won't give a damn about them as they did with 3d. Forcing the manufacturers to put them at a normal price rather than a premium because consumers are in search of it. I remember not so long ago how many on these board where doing the same about 3D, how it would be a big success, with big adoption etc. etc. How did it pan out.
 
Adkimery, there are a lot of contradictions in your points. I am not convinced. :)

Since broadcasters will be the last to change, and we are talking about TVs here, how does this make a revolution? The install base of internet TVs is growing but small. So the people who can actually watch 4k are limited to the folks who purchased 4k TVs and have them connected to the internet with a very fast internet speed, people who have 4k capable computer displays with the same fast internet speed or people with retina I-pads with the fast connection speed.

Did I leave anybody out? Does not sound like an industry overhaul from my point a view. It looks like a niche which is what most have been saying all along.

I think there will be a lot of HD being watched on those 4k TVs for quite some time.
 
Danielvilliers said:
In fact the music industry went the way of convenience rather than quality in the consumer world. I remember the days people where discussing the Future after CD. Remember those days, what did happen can be resumed in three word... MP3..
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That doesn't work if you take a step further back though. Cassette tape to CD.:laugh:

Danielvilliers said:
I remember not so long ago how many on these board where doing the same about 3D, how it would be a big success, with big adoption etc. etc. How did it pan out.
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I've said it before, 3D can't be a "huge" successes because there are to many people who are physically unable to enjoy it (it's discrimination for things to only be in 3D). Where as 4k is still 2D. Being physically unable to enjoy something, and being financially unable to, are not the same thing.

But yes, it will be that 4k comes as a default.
Before then we might see 4k tuners in HD TV's. Just like right now they all have a HD tuner built in. Some of the really small TV's are still only 720 (despite having a HD built in). They just downscale the 1080 to 720. The same could be done with 4k. If they can get the price down fast enough they wont need to bother because they can just make 4k.

You will also see it the other way around too. My Blu-Ray player has a function that when you put a normal DVD Movie in, it adds more pixels (or something) and up-scale's the picture to HD (to an extent). The same will happen with 4k.
 
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I saw a 4K TV ad the other day and they mentioned 4K bringing us "better, more immersing stories"...now imagine how GOOD...the cat/vacation-selfies/youtube blogs will be, how much more immersion will they deliver -in 4K. Imagine Ray William Johnson - in 4K? Oh lawd. Or even better, imagine some YouTube fitness/make up guru, or some "YouTube stars" music video - in 4K? Oh yes. You will really see the difference while sitting in front of your computer screen, especially the laptop/tablet guys. The dynamic range will be dramatic.

And what about the mobile folks? Retina 4K oh my I can already see mr. Ivy all excited and his eyes bulging leaning forward while explaining how the new retina has "even more clarity and dee-tail than eva befo" (british accent). And don't get me started on Vimeo timelapses...can any of you imagine a 4K timelapse? My head is spinning as we speak. We are in the middle of human revolution.

By the time 8K comes around, I think everyone will be making Apocalypse Now quality of work with their mobile phones, because as we all know, mobile phones will kill those heavy, hefty cameras, DSLR's. Cue some "technology evangelist" talking about "unbelievable power of mobile phones" and the "death of camera".

Sarcasm off, the communication noise from the advertisements is downright unbearable and I can only imagine how much more louder and aggressive will it become in the next 5-10 years. Borderline disgusting. IMO.
 
Phil vG said:
That doesn't work if you take a step further back though. Cassette tape to CD.:laugh:
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Remember what I said before, when it reaches a certain threshold. The CD was much better sound quality than tape and much more convenient too(No need to rewind forward change side etc.) But consumer chose a format with a little less quality but much better convenience. If Mp3 sounded like some old cassette, I don't think they would have adhered except for some pirate. So it depends at which level of quality your are and reaching a threshold it will only be incremental. That is why the TV channel in general will take a very very long time because 1080p will be good enough to 90% of viewers and even if it is up-scale 4k.
 
The majority of the work I do is for broadcast, both radio and television.

Radio stations will only accept commercials in MP3 now, as uncompressed wave or aiff files are too large for them to want to deal with.

TV stations and cable outlets are the same way, only accepting compressed formats of their choosing.

And all of these radio and TV stations have computer play-out servers, and most all of them re-compress your product as part of the process.

I can't tell you haw many commercials I have seen that look fantastic in the edit suite, but look like a pile of compressed crap once they hit the air.

Storage space is a big issue with these stations, and many compress the heck out of our products so they can fit more commercials on their servers.

I'm all for better codecs, but until they are implemented across the board we are still going to see video that looks like crap.
 
joe1946 said:
That is your bandwidth problem, do you think everyone has a bandwidth problem ? There are 100 million Windows XP users out there that are in for a shock after April 8th but at least they could still watch Lawrence Welk reruns on their old TVs.
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Yes, you are right, I'm a cheap bastard who only pays for 12Mbps download speed.
 
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