Just as we are starting to get really comfortable with HDTV as it is today, we are already looking ahead to the next big step.
HDTV’s and basically any other displays we use are constantly being improved.
Television resolution was locked in at 480i (NTSC) and 576i (PAL) and these resolutions were the standard in television broadcasting for decades. Today, we seem to be in a race to create the most detailed display possible and every few months there is something better being created. We may not think about it very much but this is history being made before our eyes, quite literally.
Most of us are familiar with HDTV by now, which consists of two resolutions, 1080i/p (1920 x 1080) and 720p (1280 x 720). UHDTV or Ultra High Definition Television consists of 4K aka 2160p (4096 x 2160) and 8K aka 4320p (7680 x 4320). 3840 × 2160 is also considered to be UHDTV but for obvious reasons is not considered to be 4K.
Why in the world do we need such high resolutions? Well, as we begin to increase screen size we loose detail and with screen sizes over 80 inches, as is the case with projection systems, we begin to loose some of the fine detail that standard HDTV offers on screen sizes below 80 inches. 4K has primarily been used in projection technology until recently.
Now we are seeing LCD television sets that employ both 4K and 8K technology on screens at 84 and even 145 inch screens. The name of the game here is to reduce the visibility of pixels. Technologies like the Retina display from Apple and other high dpi screens also aim to make pixels disappear but on a much smaller scale. Resolution is relative to screen size, take a 1080p image and place it on a 145 inch screen, that’s not going to look so great but also imagine 4K on your mobile phone, that’s not very practical so everything here is about making things look as smooth as possible based on screen size.
Now that we have a basic understanding of what UHDTV actually is, it’s time to consider it’s actual implementation. In order for UHDTV to be broadcast, it would require a significant amount of bandwidth to do so. Many of our current television providers struggle to get us standard HDTV without severely compressing it and removing other data from the video pipeline. This also is true with streaming video online, we have only recently seen HDTV quality streaming actually work well on the internet and this is because we are still technically in the early days of broadband internet. I know what you’re thinking, our broadband has been around for more than a decade now! Yes, it is true that high speed internet has been around and it is relatively quick but we have only seen the tip of the “broadband iceberg”. Broadband will soon be many, many times faster than it is today and that’s when it will be practical to broadcast or stream UHDTV.
I guess we can relax for now about our recent HDTV purchase as it looks like good old 1080p will be around for quite a while yet but we will start to see things change and it will be just as amazing as was the first HDTV display. It makes you wonder how much better will our displays get before we reach that theoretical “sweet spot”.