After 3D, here comes 4K
Home entertainment: A new television standard called Ultra HD is four times sharper than today’s best HDTVs. But providing content in this new format poses daunting technical challenges. And does anyone really need it anyway?
But who actually needs a super-sharp 4K television? The resolution of even an HDTV set with 1,080 progressively scanned lines (ie, continuously from top to bottom) is wasted on the vast majority of viewers. Most people sit too far from the screen to be able to see the detail it offers. A study done some years ago found the median eye-to-screen distance in American homes to be nine feet (2.7 metres). But researchers reckon that, given the human eye’s limited acuity, people even with 20/20 vision should sit no farther than 1.8 times the width of the screen away from it, if they are to distinguish the detail displayed.
At a distance of nine feet, even an existing HDTV set would need to have a screen of around 70 inches across the diagonal for viewers to benefit from the resolution they have paid for. With anything smaller at that distance, details simply blur into one another. There is no question that, with twice the resolution horizontally and vertically, a 70-inch Ultra HD screen would be pretty impressive from nine feet away, and would still provide resolvable detail at up to twice that size.
The best guide is the penetration of HDTV. America’s first nationwide broadcast in digital high-definition was John Glenn’s lift-off in the space shuttle Discovery in 1998. It took another dozen years for HDTV to go mainstream. By that reckoning, it is likely to be 2025 before Ultra HD is in half of all American homes.
Read the full story here: http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21572921-home-entertainment-new-television-standard-called-ultra-hd-four-times-sharper
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