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<DIV align=center><IMG border=0 alt="TV Tech Check"
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<P align=left><FONT color=#116e9f size=4><B><FONT size=2><FONT
size=4 face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Higher Definition
Television is On the Way<BR><BR></FONT></FONT></B></FONT><FONT
size=2><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
<P>Years ago, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was held in both
January and June. Since the late 1990's, it's just been a winter
show, but for the past several years, in June, CEA hosts the CEA
Line Shows in New York, where new consumer products can be featured
mid-year. At this year's event, Westinghouse Digital showed its
model D55QX1, a 55-inch consumer TV featuring "4K" resolution of
3,840 pixels (H) X 2,160 pixels (V), planned to be released in the
first quarter of 2013. LG, Sharp and Toshiba had previously shown 4K
TV sets at the 2012 CES. Toshiba's 55-inch 4K set was set to debut
in Japan late in 2012 (at an expected price of $12,000) but it is
not expected to be available in the U.S. until 2013. Nonetheless, 4K
TV is clearly real and starting its introductory launch in the
not-too-far future. </P></FONT></FONT>
<P>Industry interest in 4K is growing. In early June, the Consumer
Electronics Association announced the formation of a 4K Working
Group, to act as a forum for interested parties, including
broadcasters, to define 4K technology, discuss content options and
educate consumers about 4K. The first meeting of the main 4K Working
Group was held in early July, and was well attended by a broad
cross-section of the television industry. One of the subgroups,
chaired by Bryan Burns, vice president of strategic business
planning at ESPN, will be discussing content options and is
interested in the views of broadcasters and others on business
strategy and planning with respect to the opportunities in 4K TV.
Their first meeting will be held by conference call on Thursday July
12. Those interested in participating in these discussions should
contact Kinsey Fabrizio at CEA at <A
href="mailto:kfabrizio@ce.org">kfabrizio@ce.org</A>. </P>
<P>The benefits of the higher resolution of 4K (as with HDTV) are
dependent on viewing distance and screen size. With 4K though, at
typical viewing distances (such as the often quoted Lechner distance
of 9 feet) the minimum screen size to appreciate the higher
resolution starts to get rather large. Given normal 20/20 visual
acuity, humans can resolve objects with a subtended angle as small
as one arcminute (1/60th of a degree). Applying that criteria to
screens with different sizes and pixel count resolutions can yield
the relationship between maximum viewing distances for various sized
screens. A nicely produced graphic showing these relationships is
available at carltonbale.com and is reproduced
below:<BR></P></FONT></FONT>
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face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><IMG
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<DIV align=left><FONT size=2><FONT
face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></FONT><FONT
face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><BR>Note that the full benefit
of 4K TV at the 9 foot Lechner distance would require a screen
diagonal in excess of 140 inches, whereas for HDTV a screen diagonal
of about 70" will suffice. <BR><BR></FONT></FONT></DIV></DIV>
<DIV align=left><FONT size=2><FONT
face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></FONT></FONT></DIV><FONT
size=2><FONT face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
<P>As it turns out, the subject of resolution, as a proxy for the
subjective judgment of realness or sense of being there, is more
complicated than can be depicted in a simple graph. For an in-depth
treatment of the history of "high definition" and all the relevant
factors in evaluating high resolution imagery, take a look at Mark
Schubin's paper "<A
href="http://naob-advocacy.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT0yNDgwNTkzJnA9MSZ1PTAmbGk9MTIzNTQyMTE/index.html"
name=zcpre_12354211_zcpost>Why 4K: Vision and Television</A>"
presented in May 2012 at the 2012 Spring Technical Forum of
CableLabs-NCTA-SCTE. </P>
<P>4K source material exists now for consumers to view in movie
theater settings, but getting 4K into to the home environment is
just at the beginning stages. Version 1.4 of the HDMI specification
includes support for 4K, and the Sony BDP-S790 Blu Ray player, at an
MSRP of just over $200, will upscale HD content to 4K resolution.
Broadcasters' thoughts, however, turn quickly to the challenges of
transmission requirements. After all, 4K content has four times the
number of pixels as HDTV, and the 19 MB/s data capacity available in
the ATSC DTV Standard is clearly insufficient, given the limitations
of MPEG-2 compression. But newer compression schemes may change
that. In particular, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), now in the
final stages of standardization by the ITU-T \ ISO/IEC Joint
Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), could be the
compression engine that makes 4K transmission over-the-air feasible,
at least technically. At the 2012 NAB Broadcast Engineering
Conference, for example, Matthew Goldman from Ericsson presented a
paper called "High Efficiency Video Coding: Next Generation
Compression Technology Driving New Business Models for Television"
in which he made the case that today's transmission system might be
able to support 4K content with HEVC coding substituting for MPEG-2.
Below is an excerpt from the paper authored by Goldman and Ericsson
colleague Mark Horton:<BR><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>"Early HEVC tests have shown that original
non-compressed 4K TV can be shown at 18 Mbps compressed and still
show stunning results. This figure effectively means 4K TV could
potentially be shown at bitrates currently used for MPEG-2 Video
based HD services."</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></FONT>
<P><FONT size=2 face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The full paper,
along with several other papers referencing HEVC, is included in the
2012 NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference Proceedings, available
from <A
href="http://naob-advocacy.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT0yNDgwNTkzJnA9MSZ1PTAmbGk9MTIzNTQyMTI/index.html"
name=zcpre_12354212_zcpost>www.NABStore.com</A>.
</FONT><BR></P><FONT size=2><FONT
face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
<P>Terminology is also an issue in beyond-HDTV systems, especially
as a potential confusion factor for consumers. On May 24, the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) announced completion of
a new Recommendation on the technical details for Ultra High
Definition Television or UHDTV. UHDTV as defined by the ITU includes
two levels: a "4K" level of 3,840 pixels (H) X 2,160 pixels (V) (4
times HDTV) and an "8K" level of 7,680 pixels (H) X 4,320 pixels (V)
(16 times HDTV). NHK has been developing and demonstrating the 8K
system known as Super Hi-Vision for several years. Super Hi-Vision
(SHV) is likely to get significant exposure this summer as some of
the venues at the Summer Olympics will be captured in SHV and shown
at public sites. While impressive in large venues, getting the full
benefit of 8K images at the Lechner distance in a home environment
may prove to be elusive however. Extrapolating the graph above to 8K
resolution would limit the potential set of optimized homes to those
with castle-size doors and 12 foot-plus ceilings-perhaps old
Victorian homes will become all the rage with the next generation's
videophile crowd!
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