Consumer Electronics Association Gives 4K a Name
18 Oct, 2012By: Chris Tribbey

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4K has a name: Ultra High-Definition.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) Oct. 18 put a name to the next generation of home displays, putting the Ultra HD tag on giant screens with more than eight million pixels of resolution, four times the resolution of today’s widely available HDTVs.

“Ultra HD is the next natural step forward in display technologies, offering consumers an incredibly immersive viewing experience with outstanding new levels of picture quality,” said Gary Shapiro, CEA president and CEO. “This new terminology and the recommended attributes will help consumers navigate the marketplace to find the TV that best meets their needs.”

CEA’s Board of Industry Leaders unanimously approved the term and minimum requirements for a set or projector to earn the Ultra HD designation, which requires resolution of at least eight million active pixels (minimum 3,840x2,160). Displays must have an aspect ratio of at least 16x9 and must have a digital input capable of carrying native 4K video, instead of relying solely on up-converting.

“Under CEA’s leadership, the Ultra HD Working Group spent the majority of the summer meeting and discussing how to bring this technology to market,” said Gary Yacoubian, chair of the CEA Ultra HD Working Group Chairman, and president and CEO of Specialty Technology/SVS. “We discussed and debated two important steps, the name and recommended attributes, in a forum that allowed a variety of key stakeholders, manufacturers, retailers, broadcasters and Hollywood professionals to lend their voices.”

LG Electronics and Sony Electronics are both debuting 84-inch Ultra HD sets this fall. LG’s UD 84LM9600 has a list price of $20,000. Sony’s XBR-84X900 is listed at $25,000.

Current Blu-ray Disc players do not support Ultra HD video, and there are questions regarding whether broadcast Ultra HD content would require too much video compression. However, content issues are already being addressed: According to Sony Pictures, nearly 60 films have been mastered in Ultra HD since 2004, and Sony and Luxembourg-based satellite company SAS Astra said they successfully broadcast an Ultra HD transmission in September.

“TVs remain highly sought after and were the second most frequently mentioned device on consumer wish lists this holiday season, behind only tablets,” Shapiro said. “There has never been a greater time to be a consumer of televisions and displays. You can select from a wide array of choices offering outstanding high-definition picture quality, an amazing 3D experience, and interconnectivity within and outside of the home. And now we are proud to present Ultra HD for those consumers who want tomorrow’s next-generation of displays and televisions, today.”

The CEA promises Ultra HD will be a standout at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show, Jan. 8 to 11 in Las Vegas.

http://www.homemediamagazine.com/con...-4k-name-28627

Blu-ray is it for me. I will not be adapting to 4K.

4K in the theater currently is slow to non-existent - how any studio other than Sony would be behind this or equally aggressive in providing actual 4K product would surprise me.

What if the first Ultra HD title is Good Burger, though?

If you had said Dredd, I would have paused.

So, would buying an UHDTV now be the equivalent of buying an HDTV in the late 90's?

When can we expect the UHD-VHS player?

Passing on this.

Won't jump into it as 3D has proven to be a fad. I suspect this will be as well.

And The Abyss is still not 16x9.

Nor True Lies, Mr. Holland's Opus and a host of others.

I think there will be a market for it. It just won't be very big. This will likely be the next Laserdisc, not really a mass-market product.

I know it's only Sony's titles, but 60 doesn't sound like a whole lot. And of what they've mastered, how many are actually in good quality? We've seen that just having an HD master doesn't matter much if they've ruined it with DNR and edge enhancement.

Too soon.

Who cares? Wouldn't you need a screen that's 100" or over to get *any* value out of 4K? That's the resolution of the screens at a multiplex, is it not?

Well..it's a theater screen. It..it doesn't have a resolution.

I misspoke. I mean, don't they project 4K at most multiplexes?

No, because there is currently no plan for broadcast television to go to UHD, like there was for broadcast to go HD in the late 90's.

if the theater can afford it - DLP 4K is less commonplace (and I believe more expensive) than Sony 4K systems.

as I noted in posting #3 the problem is that films encoded at 4K is very rare, the only films that are currently released in 4K DCP form are 'Lawrence of Arabia' 'The Master' 'Argo' 'Samsara' and the upcoming 'SkyFall' - how or why Sony thinks 4K can succeed, they need to get other studios to follow suit and encode DCP's at 4K.

No, buying an UHDTV would be even dumber than that. In the late 90's there were already broadcast chanels that showed HD content. You could watch Jay Leno's Tonight Show in HD. PBS was mostly HD. Right now there is no 4K (or Ultra HD) content.

Right now, a PC is about the only thing that could take advantage of it. You could fit more stuff on the desktop, and games could look even sharper. I don't think I'd do it unless my video card was very powerful though, as I'd rather have 1080p at 60fps than 2160p at 30fps.

Not only that, but most cable systems can't support signals that large. It will have to prove a success in Japan before the U.S. and Europe even think about bothering with 4k.

Sony apparently stuck with the 4K name rather than Ultra HD.

Some immediate benefits of UHD TV (if you care about them) would be Passive 3D with full HD to both eyes and picture slideshows of 4K content from digital cameras.

No, this is not an immediate benefit. With passive 3D, in order to get 1x HD (spatial resolution) in both eyes, you would need to start with 2x HD source material. There is currently no content being provided in 2x HD resolution.

Uh, yes there is. Every single Blu-ray 3D disc contains full 1080p left and right eye images. On current passive 3D sets, the horizontal resolution of each image is halved. That won't be a problem on 4k sets, which can display both full 1080p images on screen simultaneously.

hmph. Not like it matters but..that'll make sense to us. To the consumer..not so much. But...like the consumer gives a fuck about that type of shit.