Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 27, 2006. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Extremely high-resolution television – what can be seen in Las Vegas for the first time outside Japan will, according to Yuji Nojiri, the intellectual father of the Ultra High-Definition project (UHD) and Director of the Science & Technical Research Laboratories at NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), find its way into home living rooms only in about 20 years.
While the broadcast industry is currently discussing a vertical resolution of 720 or 1.080 lines, the UHD system offers a resolution of 7.680 x 4.320 pixels and thus has a resolution 16 times higher than the 1080 format. Visitors to NAB can marvel at film sequences in UHD that – also a premiere – are accompanied by 22.2 multichannel sound.
The images impress with their brilliance, which is difficult to describe. One sequence shows a football stadium with the goal and the occupied spectator stands in the background. Every single spectator is clearly recognizable; in its entirety the scene achieves a liveliness that comes very close to reality. During the corner kick, the ball in flight is very clearly recognizable as such. Another sequence shows the cityscape of New York, recorded from a high-rise building, in breathtaking quality – almost a touch too real.
The images were recorded in 60p. According to the producer of the New York recordings, Nagamitsu Endo, shuttering can be perceived during fast camera pans. The attentive observer can indeed also recognize this. This raises the question of whether the frame rate will not have to be substantially higher in future, perhaps at 100p.
Each individual image occupies 75 MByte of storage space. For recording, the Japanese use a hard-disk recorder that holds several TByte and is sufficient for 18 minutes of recording. They then transfer the storage to tape within 7 hours and archive the recording. The overall system consist of camera, display and hard-disk recorder. Optical transmission is handled by a DWDM codec system (Dense Wavelenght Division Multiplexing).
During the World Exposition in Aichi in 2005 and at the Kyushu National Museum, NHK has already demonstrated the UHD system in daily use.
Further links:
- NHK Super Hivision (UHD)
