Death of HD? "2013...2K and 4K to Consumer Cameras"

If you review the Apple marketing literature, I think you'll agree that "Retina" is a branding exercise, not a scientific claim or even a commercial standard. A technical claim like "264 ppi display" is easily copied and trumped by their competitors. By calling it "Retina" they are creating a brand that can't be copied by a competitor.

Anyway, where did you see Apple claim that "any improvements on resolution would be literally pointless"?

Will Turner said:
I'm all for 4k. Who knows.. we might actually get sharp/full raster 1080p images from DSLR's if they are advertising them at 4k. Based on the fact that the current crop advertise '1080p' but resolve nowhere near that (generalisation, I know some of them like the gh2 come close but still no cigar if you ask me).



Do you even understand the premise behind retina screens? The DPI is so high that pixels are indistinguishable and any improvements on resolution would be literally pointless.
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Vitaliy Kiselev said:
It is fun to see all this bulls*%t said by Barry to be nodded by others just because he is who he is.
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This is an unnecessary and hostile comment.

Guys, 3D was not and is not a flop.
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And I can assure you you are 100% wrong on that.

4K will be available in VERY near future. With monitors, TVs and even tablets (what could play 4K) available in 2013 and cameras annouced in 2013.
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Nobody is arguing that it will be available.

And consumers will buy them happily despite accelerating collapse of US and EU economies.
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Perhaps we can agree to disagree. Or even make a bet. Why not put your money where your mouth is, and commit to a date by which you think the majority of households in the US and EU will have 4K televisions installed?
 
We have had a high end Panasonic 3d 60-inch plasma TV for two years.

We bought active 3D glasses to watch the Olympics last summer.

We used them twice.

Our local provider (Comcast) has two 3D channels. We have watch 30 minutes of footage. Haven't watched anything since the Olympics.

There is no content being distributed of any consequence - at least from our provider.

We have watched Avatar in 3D. Impressive, but fatiguing to watch. The only content that looks good in 3d, to us, is animated content -- not our favorite content.

That's it.

To me, at least, it is a gimmick.
 
Great for Sony to bring these sensors out for mass consumption. And so many folks laugh at me for pointing out that the parts in a 2K/4K camera cost peanuts. I now feel vindicated :)
I should point out that while 2K/4K are fine and dandy, some of the most pressing issues dogging the prosumer cameras, have yet to be resolved.
I speak of Moire, Jello effect from rolling shutters and the less than stellar DR from some of the sensors out there.

This may all change simultaneously but I sure hope that we don't see 2k/4K DSLR's before the other issues have been worked out first ..
Besides. I'm confident the DSLR form factor is almost over.
 
David Saraceno said:
We have had a high end Panasonic 3d 60-inch plasma TV for two years.

We bought active 3D glasses to watch the Olympics last summer.

We used them twice.

Our local provider (Comcast) has two 3D channels. We have watch 30 minutes of footage. Haven't watched anything since the Olympics.

There is no content being distributed of any consequence - at least from our provider.

We have watched Avatar in 3D. Impressive, but fatiguing to watch. The only content that looks good in 3d, to us, is animated content -- not our favorite content.

That's it.

To me, at least, it is a gimmick.
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And it's fascinating to see the responses people and critics have to a lot of the 3D content that come out.

One example that really stands out to me is Tintin - it's a FANTASTIC film. I saw it in 2D with a packed out audience and we were all laughing and gasping with excitement through much of the movie. There was literally one moment, at the end of the plane sequence, that had what sounded like the entire theatre collectively exhaling - because we'd all been holding our breathes, then when everyone realised we'd all been holding our breath, the whole theatre burst out laughing - and how often do you get experiences like that in a cinema these days?

Everyone left the movie happy and exhilarated, talking about just how good the film was. However if you went by the critical reviews of the film (all of which reviewed the 3D version of the film) things are far less rosy - mainly because it was hard to watch in 3D, the film had a lot to take in in 2D, but in 3D it was such a visual and sensory overload that it was physically hard for a lot of people to watch.

And no one goes to the movies to be stressed just by the actually watching of the film.

...let alone pay a premium for it.

That's why 3D will always fail until it can be presented as Barry describes - without any difficulties or inconveniences.
 
Zephyrnoid said:
And so many folks laugh at me for pointing out that the parts in a 2K/4K camera cost peanuts.
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It's not that...it's because you don't understand costs like salaries, development, failed prototypes, ect. ect. ect. Your business sense is woefully nonexistent.
 
Vitaliy Kiselev said:
It is fun to see all this bulls*%t said by Barry to be nodded by others just because he is who he is.

Guys, 3D was not and is not a flop. I can assure you as I am familiar exactly with customer side of this.

4K will be available in VERY near future. With monitors, TVs and even tablets (what could play 4K) available in 2013 and cameras annouced in 2013.

And consumers will buy them happily despite accelerating collapse of US and EU economies.
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He's not speaking bulls..t. The debate is whether HD is "Dead". People seem to be missing that in these discussions. HD is NOT EVEN CLOSE to being dead. I don't know ONE SINGLE EFFING person who owns a 3d tv or even knows that Ultra HD even exists. In our world we follow these things...most people don't.
Smaller electronics are different than the discussion of people spending a paycheck on a new format they've never heard of with zero cable companies broadcasting in that format.
 
OK, here are my predictions. For Dec 2014.

1. We'll get a 4K large sensor interchangeable-lens camera for under $10,000 that has picture quality that, when downsampled to HD, beats a Sony F3 in terms of resolution, latitude and low light ability.

2. The world won't be flooded with 4K displays. But there will be a niche market in the home - and you'll be able to sell that niche market a premium product for a premium price. This may or may not make economic sense for you, depending on the product. There also will be some support on the theatrical level. Heck, there already is.

3. There will still be successful 3D movies in theatres. 3D in the home will remain a niche - but again, you'll still be able to sell to this niche for a premium price and it might make economic sense for you to do this.

4. All of the crazy people saying 4K / 3D will completely take over will be wrong. All of the crazy people saying 4K / 3D will never take over will be wrong.

5. The 4K systems will also all make for better 3D. In theaters, 4K laser will allow for much, much brighter 3D with passive glasses. At home, most 4K TV systems will support passive glasses, giving full-res passive HD 3D. This will improve things over current passive systems which are half-res.

5. I'm definitely not going to want to buy a camera that can't do 4K. But some people still will.

6. Computers will be faster, software will be smarter and both 4K and 3D will be easier to do.

7. These are all niche things and the real excitement is over whether all of this promised Internet distribution wonderfulness / the death of cable / 21st century magic allows us to actually make money in an independent manner doing what we love. Not sure about that! That doesn't depend on 4K or 3D, or course.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
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>The highest 3 dimensional resolution that Blu-Ray supports is 720p.

It is false. Blue-ray 3D host frame packed mode each of left and right frames are 1080 (24fps).

All 3D televisions also support 1080 in 60fps, but not frame packed, interline or anamorphic.
 
>This is an unnecessary and hostile comment.

But true :-)

>And I can assure you you are 100% wrong on that.

I am not using emotions here as you are.

Panasonic is done on TV market, and Samsung and LG TVs with 3D are now mainstream, with only entry models lacking this feature. It'll be even less for 2013 models, where all but entry models will also have good double/quad core ARM chips for SmartTV functions.

Worse even, 4K will be major advantage for 3D, as it'll coincide with move of most major manufacturers to passive 3D (tody it is LG and Philips).
>Perhaps we can agree to disagree. Or even make a bet. Why not put your money where your mouth is, and commit to a date by which you think the majority of households in the US and EU will have 4K televisions installed?

LOL. Many are not even sure if US and EU housholds will have electricity 24 hours a day in 2016 :-)

As for 4K, speed this time will depend only on manufacturers, and to be more precise on panel factories modification speed.

Tablet owners already paid big part of required money :-)
 
Let's do the math 1280x720x2x60fps=110 megapixels per second. 1920x1080x2x24fps=99 megapixels per second.
Not only is this so called full high definition 1080p less resolution than 720p but it causes motion sickness as well.
No wonder 3D is a failure.
 
While admittedly Perth is probably one of the most backwater capital cities in the western world, we haven't even turned off the analogue transmission yet. It's broadcast in parrallel with digital. The grey brigade just hasn't been interested in the switch. I believe the new deadline is March 2013 but I expect that will slip too...it's the third or fourth deadline set so far. I believe the government backed controlling body is even offering to buy them new tvs just so they can turn off the tower. The ACMA needs to reassign the frequencies for other usage.

I'm a tech who's regularly in people's homes working on their tvs and cable. At least 10% of cable subscribers still have CRT televisions, closer to 25% for non-cable customers. And while an isolated backwater, we're supposed to have one of the world's leading economies at the moment on the back of a sustained resources boom. Not strictly true (miners manipulate the media to vastly inflate their contribution and influence), some sectors of the community are doing very well out of it and driving up the cost of living for the rest of us. Yet even though food, utilities and rent are 2-3 times higher than 10 years ago and wages have largely stagnated, luxuries like tvs are cheaper by a similar factor. So while the introductory price of 4K will be out of the range of most, a good mid-range HD tv can be afforded by most low income people just by tightening the belt for a month. Yet they haven't been buying them. Most middle income houses I have been in seem to have favoured putting a cheap digital tv in every room at the same cost of one really good one in the lounge ('faults' usually the result of an insane gang of splitters - buy an amp!). Maybe that's a local peculiarity but it demonstrates that people don't often use the technology in the way you expect.

The other issue I would wonder about with a high uptake of 4K is bandwidth. I disclose that I'm a tech not an engineer so some of my premise could be misplaced. But if 4K contains what is it, 16?, 32? times the data of HD...where are you going to find the bandwidth if everything is broadcast in 4K? Just looking at cable on the spectrum analyser slightly less than two-thirds of the available bandwidth is assigned. Once we move internet across to fibre in about 5 years that will leave about half. We'll ignore that some of that bandwidth is rendered unusable due to instability and interference so we're saying half between 98-743MHz is available. At the moment we have about 20 bouquets of 16 feeds of SD assigned (about half actually in use) and about half again assigned to HD. I can't be bothered hitting the books to make a general point but it seems to me that 4K (unless compressed to death, as many of the existing feeds already are since the switch to mpeg a few years ago) would need a whole bouquet to itself. That's a lot less channels (maybe a good thing).

In a wireless world there's a lot of services competing with broadcast for use of a limited bandwidth. Compression and sensitivity of equipment can make better use of it but physics only supplies so much. Cable allows double use of the available spectrum, fibre makes the light spectrum available but both are massive infrastructure projects for those places that don't already have them. Not saying you couldn't broadcast 4K via terrestrial or cable, just that it would have to be a premium channel supported by lesser formats in order to preserve existing high volumes of varied content to the market. Which addresses the OP.
 
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Vitaliy Kiselev said:
>This is an unnecessary and hostile comment.

But true :-)
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Do you realize how offensive your comment is? It's outrageous. You just basically called all those thinking, breathing, working professionals "brainless puppets". It's offensive. It's arrogant and egotistical and outrageous.

I am not using emotions here as you are.
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So now you dismiss factual responses as "emotional"? That's -- well, I guess it's in your character, but it's counterproductive to having a worthwhile discussion.

Panasonic is done on TV market, and Samsung and LG TVs with 3D are now mainstream, with only entry models lacking this feature. It'll be even less for 2013 models, where all but entry models will also have good double/quad core ARM chips for SmartTV functions.
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According to the Consumer Electronics Association, only 24% of shoppers even would want a 3D feature on their television. DirecTV has abandoned their 3D aspirations. ESPN 3D has cut their programming back to practically nothing. AT&T's UVerse "cable" service dropped ESPN 3D from their service, citing "low demand". Nintendo canceled their 3D plans for a 3D channel. Samsung, one of the biggest promoters of 3D (and the maker of the 3DTV that I own) has said that "smart TV" features are a better sales hook than 3D is. And Samsung is "overstocked" with 3DTVs (meaning, they can't sell them because customers aren't buying them).

The Consumer Electronics Association, in 2010, predicted that 4 million 3DTV sets would be sold in 2010. They later cut that projection down to 1 million -- and didn't classify those as "units sold", they classified that as "units shipped to dealers." Through the end of last year, they said that a total of 3.6 million 3DTVs should have been shipped to dealers. 3.6 million. Total. There were 247.7 million TV sets sold in 2011. Only 3.6 million of those were 3DTV. That's 1.45% of the market that bought 3D.

And you know what's even funnier? I would wager that lots of those people who bought those 3DTVs, didn't buy them for their 3D capability, nor did they intend to get 3D. It just so happened that the model that they wanted, also had 3D. I can testify to that, because -- as I said earlier, I have a 3DTV. Didn't know it when I bought it at the time; didn't find out it supported 3D until I was reading the owner's manual.

As for 4K, speed this time will depend only on manufacturers, and to be more precise on panel factories modification speed.

Tablet owners already paid big part of required money :-)
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Just because something is available, and is being pushed by the manufacturers, does not mean that it is accepted and embraced by the consumers. Sony and Panasonic have had to learn this lesson the hard way; Sony's market capitalization has shrunk from 120 billion 10 years ago, to 10 billion today. Panasonic's market cap is about 13 billion last I checked, so both of them are massively smaller than they were.

So yes, people will make 4K available. They also made SACD (Super Audio CD) and DVD-Audio available -- and how well did those go over?

Here's my prediction: 3DTV is, to the home consumer, akin to being today's LaserDisc -- a tiny niche product that a tiny few will buy, and will be eventually abandoned. And it will be offered again, 10 or 15 years from now, only maybe by that time they'll have gotten it right.
 
He had his chance to outlay his evidence for his position, but throw it all away in order to take more cheap shots. Barry clearly outlines his position with facts and figures.

So who's really "using emotions" here?
 
Agreed. Just can't argue hard evidence of sales...or as the saying goes "It is what it is" Not what anyone claims it will be, or should be
 
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