4K! Finall,y a screen good enough for all my 4K blu-rays... err, I mean my super-hi-def cable package... oh wait... Solution looking for a problem.
I think the idea is you'd stream 4K content, like we do with Netflix today. If the TV has the required number of tuners, it could display 2 columns of 3 rows of full HDTV pictures, so you could basically watch a few NFL games at the same time on Sundays. Or you could double the pixels of the video source and use the upper half of the screen to show a program and the bottom half to show a WWW browser or some other information.
My bad. UHD is about 2x wider than I suggested in my post above, and it's 4320 tall or just enough to fit 4 full HDTV pictures tall. So you could display 4 columns of 4 rows of full HDTV pictures on it. I'd love one for my desktop computer monitor (not 55" though, something half that size would do).
4K is twice as wide and twice as tall which in total is four times as many pixels. So it could fit four 1080p TVs with all the detail. I'm waiting until we get 8K on cell phones then I can watch 16 full HDTV feeds all at once on a 4 inch TV.
The 4K refers to the height. It's 7680x4320 pixels, or EXACTLY 4x the 1920 width of HD and 4x the 1080 height of HD.
Most streaming content today is a very poor quality 1080p if its even that. Most users don't notice the difference. Comapre a quality Blu-Ray movie to the same "HiDef" movie on DirectTV or online streaming reveals vastly different pictures. Satellite and Cable companies compress the hell out of their content so they can fit more channels. Streaming services compress to pay for less data bandwidth. I'm sure if a number of 4K TV's end up in homes you'll be able to stream a "4K" movie but if the overall quality is less than today's blu-rays whats the benefit?
Edit: some confusion over the exact resolution we'll be seeing in the future so the post I made is worthless Looks like 4K is going to run at about 16Gb/hour. Google offers Kansas City 500 hours of HD/month which I think represents their up and down cap. That's 8Tb, or 80x what most high-end broadband packages offer for their monthly allotment, supposing Google upgrades from HD to UHD and retains the same numbers.
They've been showing 150 MBit cable modem speeds at the various trade shows for the past couple years. It's only a matter of time before we actually get it. Google launched a 1 GBit/second internet service in Kansas City - no telling if/when they'll expand elsewhere. Blu-ray has a maximum bit rate of 48 MBit/sec, though most discs are in the 25 MBit/sec range. 48 MBits is about .48 MBytes per second. A 2 hour movie would take 3.5 GBytes if downloaded to a local disk drive (or other storage). It would take ~1/3 that amount of time to download at 150 MBit/sec. You'd be able to stream Blu-ray quality compressed UHD video at 400MBit/sec (16x larger screen, 25 MBit/sec).
Ah, the article I read said UHD, which is 8K. At 4K resolution, you'd need 100MBit/sec to stream Blu-ray quality full screen video.
Blu-ray movies are normally 20GB so I'm not sure where you get the 3.5GB from. Edit: Max bluray 1x speed is 36MBit/s. There are 8 bits in a byte so that equals 4.5MB/s. 4.5x60x60x2/1024= 31.6GB for a 2 hour movie.
http://www.hdtvexpert.com/?p=2526 Thorpe talked about the challenges of designing lenses for 4K cameras and illustrated that there are no lenses for 4K cameras with equivalent zoom ratios to today’s 2K camera optics – not an insurmountable obstacle, but a challenge nonetheless for camera manufacturers. He also provided details about a live 4K broadcast earlier this of a baseball game in Japan via satellite links, using a nominal data rate of 120 Mb/s, and discussed how Fox Sports has used a pair of 4K Sony F65 cameras this season to assist NFL referees when they review challenged plays.
I'm wondering what the news is in the story. I was at the Sony Store at the mall by me before Christmas, and they had an 84" 4K TV on display. I remember using my iPhone to google for the price (was like $25K). So is it the stand that is the news? That Samsung is making one? Seems to me this is way bigger news: http://www.techspot.com/news/51275-panasonic-sony-show-off-56-inch-uhd-4k-oled-tvs.html For both the OLED technology and the relatively small screen size (56 inch).
