CES 2013: 4K Is This Year's Most Amazing Tech, And It's Completely Impractical

There will come a point (and some say we are either there or close already) where the TV companies will run out of feasible resolution. That is, from any decent viewing distance you won't be able to see pixels. The question is what will the TV companies push then as the latest and greatest reason to pay a huge premium to them for something. For decades resolution has been been the biggie, as well as size. Now as both of those are getting maxed out, either TVs will become ever-more commoditized or the manufacturers will have to try and find some other feature to convince us that we have to pay a premium.

It will be interesting to see which way it turns. I suspect some of each will happen, with a sharp difference in viewpoints amongst some companies.

I wonder if the Sony 3D goggles will soon provide a 4K experience?

Still, I do enjoy learning about the new technology coming down the pike. Yea, its new and expensive, but we all know in the future with electronics, it always gets cheaper and faster.

One day the resolution and sound will be so awesome, you humans will just give everything real of life and stay with your multimedia, mean while the robots will take over the Earth!

You are all so easily distracted, lol.

As for the storage issue, good thing we have Moore's law: the number of transistors on circuits doubles every two years. This goes for processing power, sensors, resolution, and memory capacity. Within a few years, a normal 4k box could store dozens of 100 terabyte 4k movies.

I don't see the point of the extra resolution, given the viewing distance. Instead, I would think that additional dynamic range (contrast) would matter more, given that the eye does perceive a much wider range than displays can presently render.

Brightside (aquired by Dolby) had an interesting product: an LCD TV with a LED backplane. The combination of the two allowed for very bright (LED fully on, LCD letting much light through) and very dark (LED very low, LCD letting very little through) parts of the image. This was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 04, the name was HDRDisplay.
I don't know why there has not been products along those lines since Brightside, and instead TV makers are focused on 4K ;-)

Indirect good news, this will make all lesser type TVs become cheaper, YEA!

Heres another fun thing about 4K:

As someone who makes 3D animations, I know how long it takes to render stuff. On my decent computer it takes 6 hours to churn out about a minute of animation at 720p. Imagine the computing power it would take to render a full length animated movie in 4K.

On the subject of storage though, theres been a technology in the works for a while called "holographic versatile disc" which can hold 6 TB of data and read/write it fast enough to be feasible. Only downside is players are expected to cost 10,000+ $ and discs around 200$.

"insert joke about apple retina tv here"

I will wait until the 64K comes out. 4K no thanks I got caught in the Atari-Commodore wars in the eighties, today 4K tomorow 64K, you see were I'm going with this.....

Ron Bennett

Not in our lifetime. The technology is not in sync with the innovations.

@Mukuro Holmes - Moore's law specifically only applies to circuits on a chip, but it is used as as a standard to measure the rate of advancement in other fields to see if their fast. Hard drive capacity increases have slowed a bit recently, maybe theyll pick up again, but right now were seeing about a terabyte a year. which is much slower than moore's law.

&Blarg king A better idea would be to use that fancy new windows 8 storage pools feature and by a bunch of drives or use a NAS and if your really loaded, a SAN, which will cost as much as your holo drive and give you more functionality.

A 4k movie will not take 10 terabytes to store. An average movie would be around 300GB. The 10TB figure comes from other websites who work out the math, and I guess PopSci just feels they can steal those figures and not mention that that is only that large if uncompressed. It sounds much more sensational that way. I haven't read PopSci in a while, and now I know why. The writing on this website is even worse than Gizmodo. PopSci consists of short blurbs for articles that simply copy and paste bits from other websites.

A 4k movie takes up ~10TB UNCOMPRESSED.

As a point of comparison, a 2-hour movie at 1080p takes up ~600GB without compression (video only). And the standard dual layer Blu-ray discs we have been using for years only hold 50GB. So how have they been fitting 600+GB of data on a 50GB disc and still have room for audio and special features? They compress the video.

Using the same quality of compression on the average Blu-ray movie, I would guess they could get a 4K movie to well under 1TB. Still more than a standard Blu-Ray disc can handle, but a far cry from this 10TB nonsense.

@TheZomb Windows 8 storage pool? I have no idea what that is nor do I think it would be any use to people like me who use a Mac.

A fantastic tv (that first one), with a horribly simple design. If you want simple, at least make it simple and awesome like apple and sony usually do.

@Blarg_King

sounds like you need to try and sell the mac on Ebay, and come over to the winning team, windows owns 92% of the market share, that many people cant be wrong ;0)

@Imatardbot

Right. Or I could keep my Mac because its lasted me better than any PC I ever owned and apple has the largest growth of any computer company right now.

And its not a matter of being wrong, its simply a matter of choice and many people not wanting to try change.

Also your name is Im a tard bot. Hardly a name to convince people that your opinion is worth listening to.

@Blarg_King "because its lasted me better"

perhaps we should switch names LOL

well considering that mac and pc are the only real choices out there, oh yes and linux too, if mac grew .001% they would be the fastest growing company out there, the only thing keeping mac propped up is the fact that you can buy an emulator for mac so you can run windows software LOL

When I went off to college in the fall of 1997, my family bought me a computer. It was a 200mhz IBM with a 4.3 gig hard drive and 32 megs of RAM. I was king nerd amongst my friends because I had the fastests computer and 4.3 gigs was just obscenely huge for a hard drive. If you had a 4.3 gig hard drive kicking around nowadays you wouldn't bother to use it because it wouldn't even be big enough for your music collection. Geez, most modern smartphones have more storage capacity than that.

What I'm getting at is by the time these TVs are mainstream, I don't think storage will be a problem. By that time high capacity solid state drives will be a lot cheaper, and R&D folks will have found yet another trick to cram more data onto a hard drive. However, I predict that physical media (whatever the next generation of that may be) for movies will need to make a comeback. Either that, or people will need to download movies before watching them (download & store vs. streaming) because I don't see everyone getting high bandwidth fiber optic lines in their houses anytime soon.

@tardbot Or you know people actually like Mac and buy them. could be that. They grew 11% one year. Thats significant growth.

Once the data becomes so large, so fast, and so extreme and detailed to where we cannot tell the multimedia from reality, the MATRIX will come to life!

And after the humans are fully entertained and plugged in, robots will begin fully automate and dominate the planet!

And just think, you humans will ask and pay for this too, lol!

@Blarg_King

The growth you speak of is due to sales of the iphone and ipad and has nothing to due with the mac you first made reference to

So? Who cares? Its a computer! Its a matter of choice! There is not "winning" team theres just different options. Just because one company sells more copies of its OS than the other doesn't mean its better.

@Blarg_King

You are absolutely right, it is a choice, and most people (92%) choose not to by mac's, and it has always been my experience that if the majority of people buy something, it is simply a better product.

Or maybe people just never try mac and therefore have no idea?
A huge percent of consumers aren't that tech savvy and therefor just buy an inexpensive computer and most inexpensive computers run windows.

I've heard plenty of stories of people switching to Mac and being happy. never heard one story of a guy switching to Windows and being happy. My brothers a die hard Windows guy I asked him if he was going to get Windows 8 and he laughed and said he would never spend money on a tablet OS.

apple is perfect for the non-tech-savvy, from what I have read, most of the new apple products are non upgradable...so lets see if I have this right, buy an overpriced computer use it for 2 years, drill a hole in it and use it for a boat anchor, then run out and buy another overpriced computer.... ya that's about right I think ;0)

I've been using my MacBook Pro for 3 years without upgrades it still works fine.
Its hardly over priced for what you get. While my brothers cheap Windows laptops are all scratched and ugly my nice aluminum MacBook looks as good as the day I bought it.

Premium price for premium ingredients. Its like food. Sure you can buy a cheeseburger from McDonalds for 1.50$ and it will fill you up, but if you want good quality food that tastes good your going to have to pay a lot more for it.

Same analogy works with cars. You can buy a kia for 15,000$ but if you had the money you would probably spend 100,000$ on a ferrari or am aston martin. Quality is expensive.

Imatardbot, please don't call yourself that or imply that someone is stupid while saying "LOL" and using horrible grammer. This is coming from a teenager.

@Maklom

If you want people to understand what you are talking about you might want to put down a complete sentence.

are you saying LOL is bad grammar, or that I was using bad grammar, or that I need to change my name while using LOL and bad grammar? also are you the teenager or are you talking about blarg_king?

Also you might notice the proper spelling is grammar not grammEr.

@Blarg_King

you realize that apple switched over to intel cpu's so you are still paying more for the same thing I have in my PC right? hdd's and memory are from whoever gives apple the best deal. same hardware twice the price;o)

Yeah I'm talking about build quality not the parts inside.

And come on I can get a Mac Mini with a core i7 for 800$ thats hardly over priced your going to pay that for any computer with a core i7. Also apple get's in intels newest CPU's way before the PC market. We got nice Ivy Bridge CPU's while Windows users still had to use Sandy Bridge.

I guess I have never really paid attention to retail cpu release dates, I have been building my own pc's for the last 20 years, and after I overclock them they are generally faster then what you can buy off the shelf, for a few months anyway.

so I wonder after re-reading your post's you think mac's are superior because they have a better case? I say that because we have eliminated the os and hardware as being better...all that leaves is your shiny aluminium case. ;0)

Just to drop some maths on this 10TB nonsense. The storage needed for a movie is proportional to the information contained within which is in the worst case scenario proportional to the number of pixels. For example, 100x100=10.000 pixels require double the storage of 71x71=+-5000 pixels. Actually it's less because compression algorithms don't scale linearly, but let's just go with that for the sake of argument.
4352x2176 pixels are a total of about 9.5 million pixels. FullHD, or 1080p, is 1920x1080, or about 2 million pixels. 4K contains precisely 4,57 times as many pixels. A quality-wise top of the line 1080p movie can be compressed without artifacts or loss of detail into less than 10GB, usually less than 5GB. A 4K movie should need no more than 50GB to achieve top quality. That's only about 200 times less than what was stated in this article, and all I needed was a pocket calculator...

I bet they could stream it in kansas city, with google fiber.

Amen, brother!
I was about to say the same thing, essentially.
4.57 times the pixels means (at most) 4.57 times the storage space!

Also, this means 4.57 times the bandwidth required. Again, a far cry from the quoted figure (100 mbps)!

Perhaps the _real_ reason people won't be buying 4K TV's is that 1080p already looks razor sharp on most, if not all, TV's viewed at actual viewing distance (when you are watching TV)

Nobody in there right mind ever stores video as a stream of bitmaps ever.

4k is functionally the same as four streams of 1080 patched together. Two hours of blu ray fits on a 25gb disk so four streams of two hours would fit on a 100 gb blu ray disk.

It takes less space to store a similar quality compressed images at 4k than four separate 1k(1080) images. Even a lossless compression (yes there is such a thing)would have a very significant bits per pixel ratio benefit from the higher resolution.

Rasters (pixels) are so old school. Vector based video is the new kid on the block. Pixel based video can be visualized as a 3d array of dots with depth being time with a row for each frame kind of like a stack of transparencies. If we look at just a bouncing red ball as it passes through the frames ie we cut it out of our stack of transparencies it would form a 3d wiggly cylinder shape, if we describe that shape with maths and store that description instead of all the pixels it takes we can save allot of room with out loosing immage quality. What's best is it will be pixle and frame rate independent, meaning you can use the same file to watch on an old standard definition tv or rlb2's new 64k tv at 20 hz or 500 hz and it will always be full fidelity. This is only one of the techniques that will be used in the codecs of the future.

PS I have 1.4 Gbps fiber internet at my home (but I only use 50 mbps), don't know what all your guyses connection problem is.