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Television Media

Ultra High Definition Video 290

Posted by michael from the haha-your-new-tv-is-already-obsolete dept.
hovermike writes "This story about UHDV (Ultra High Definition Video) comes from the NY Times. Here are a few specs from the article: 'picture size of 7,680 by 4,320 pixels'; 'UHDV's beefed-up refresh rate of 60 frames per second (twice that of conventional video), projected onto a 450-inch diagonal screen with more than 20 channels of audio'; '22.2 sound: 10 speakers at ear level, 9 above and 3 below, with another 2 for low frequency effects'; AND THE KICKER, 'All those sound channels and all those image pixels add up to a lot of data. In test, an 18-minute UHDV video gobbled up 3.5 terabytes of storage (equivalent to about 750 DVD's). The data was transmitted over 16 channels at a total rate of 24 gigabits per second.' Don't think I'll wait to buy regular 'old' HDTV..."
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Ultra High Definition Video More

Ultra High Definition Video

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  • Viewscreen (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:12AM (#9343517)
    So *that's* what powers the view screen on the Enterprise. Cool! :)

  • First Thought.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ricky-road-flats ( 770129 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:13AM (#9343525) Homepage
    The post-production touch-up jobs on porn acresses is going to have to get a *lot* better at that kind of resolution!

    Please note: first thoughts != best thoughts

    • Confused (Score:5, Funny)

      by Bozdune ( 68800 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @09:02AM (#9343675)
      What kind of porn are you watching, anyway, where they bother with post-production touch-up -- or plot, for that matter?

    • Re:First Thought.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      There are already a number of actors who insist on "soft focus" when appearing on SDTV.

      Many TV stations found out that their sets looked really cheesy when they tested them with HD video cameras. Not to mention the faces of the "talent'.

      • Re:First Thought.... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Artifakt ( 700173 )
        The flip side of this may be that the what conventional TV turned into "just a swamp" will look like an "interesting marshland ecosystem", and actually filming on location in a real 400 year old castle will make a version of Dracula that will spook your socks off.

  • Right ... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by n0d3 ( 708403 )
    Even with the high data rates we can achief today, this will be a while to be usable I think

    It's easy to make up insane specs n such, to be able to use them is a other

    • Re:Right ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by nounderscores ( 246517 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:20AM (#9343541)
      On the other hand, perhaps this may be better as an educational tool:

      "And here you can see the distribution of Influenza cases superimposed across this landsat image lower manhattan... and my apartment. Hey! There's me! And I have the flu."
    • Well, as far as internet streaming goes, that's out of the question. But 24gbps isn't unachievable with today's broadcast techniques. There's also a question of how compression is done.

      A cluster of ASICs could be used to decode the signal.
    • From the article: "But NHK is familiar with long-term projects: it began developing the HDTV standard in 1964, and the first high-definition content arrived only in 1982." And HDTV is finally filtering down to the masses, 40 years later. They're not just defining random specs, they're defining them for decades later down the road when people can support the bandwidth.

  • At least we have some good news (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Phoenixhunter ( 588958 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:14AM (#9343529)
    We're about a decade away from reaching the point where there increasing the resolution of the screen will not be detectable to the human eye, at which point, one could go about collecting a collection of Ultra-High Def DVD's without worrying about a 'better' version coming out soon. So you can get all of your 20th century and early 21st century media and know that your great grandkids will view it exactly the same.

    • Re:At least we have some good news (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      unless you grandchildrern have updated eye-chips installed in their brain :)

    • Re:At least we have some good news (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:46AM (#9343622)
      There will always, however, be people who claim to be able to detect the undetctable and spend ungodly amounts of money not to detect it.

      KFG
    • ...I'm sure they'll make it so that the copyright is infinitely durable, and your discs far from it even in perfect care, which isn't going to be the case anyway. And don't think you'll have the luxury of back-ups. So you can get all of your 20th century and early 21st century media and know that your great grandkids will have to buy exactly the same disc over and over again.

      Of course, all I get here is interlaced PAL on cable. Earth to TV networks: I'm getting better progressive/HDTV feeds via newsgroups
    • The problem is that in many cases (this isn't one of them) increasing the number of pixels simply means a bigger screen -- not better resolution.

      This technology probably won't be used to make a better picture on the 20" screen but will give you the ability to have a 200" screen without looking at gigantic pixels.
    • For many typical viewing distances, we're alrady there.

      I've got a 9' wide projection setup that displays 1365x768, and from 15' or so away, the pixels are small enough that I'm losing detail because of my vision, not because of the resolution of the image. I typically sit more like 8' or 9' away where I can pick out some pixel-y details (like jaggies), but sitting that close means that the image takes up a huge portion of my FOV.

      I imagine for typical setups of 42" or 50" plasma displays that do 720p nati
    • That depends on how far you sit from the TV. At some multiples of screen size you only need 2048p to hit the max for the human eye. At others you need UHDTV. If you don't have good eye sight and sit 3 - 4 X of the TVs width from the TV 1080p is already maxing out the resolution detectable by the eye.

      http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolutio n. html
    • We're about a decade away from reaching the point

      It took about forty years to take HDTV from the lab to a commercial product. (Development first started on it at NHK in 1964.)

      I don't think we're "about a decade away" from anything like that.
    • It is at the point wheree going higher resolution is moot, but on a screen that is movie theater size, you'll want that resolution. IIRC, movie frames are often rendered in 4k pixel resolution.

      Some people will say it is too sharp, but the beauty is that you can add analog-looking grain and probably make it indistinguishable from a good modern film projection. Personally, I prefer analog-looking artifacts more than digital-looking artifacts because they often represent reality better.

    • Re:At least we have some good news (Score:4, Informative)

      by bit01 ( 644603 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @05:03PM (#9346046)

      The resolution of the human eye is about 2500x2500 (6-7,000,000) cone cells (color) and 35000x35000 (120,000,000) rod cells (grey). Not evenly spread and the rods are not individually sensitive with multiple rods triggering the one nerve. See this [gsu.edu] more detail.

      ---

      It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
      It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
      Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.

  • Thank you very much (Score:5, Funny)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:14AM (#9343531)
    I have to change my underwear now.. and have a smoke...

  • nice, but what is the point? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by randomized ( 132106 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:15AM (#9343532)
    I like the resolution and all, but in all seriousness... with ever decreasing space for our living, this is not exactly customer product. Your 68" tv does not need such high resolution, I hardly have space to put my 5.1 system in the 2 bedroom condo I am staying in...

    Even if the price is within our reach, this piece of technology is going to be left to corporations and ultra rich people with lots of real estate. I fail to see point of having this, except for new digital cinemas.

    My god, watching the latest holycrud with mind boggling resolution...
    • i have to disagree. my folks have a 51" HDTV, and i can still see the pixels. definitely room for improvement.

      consider that a 17" WXGA screen is 1440x900- you could definitely go up to, say, a 50" screen with this resolution and have something really photoreal, even when you're standing up close to it. ...not that one usually watches their 50" TV from such a distance, but maybe we would if it looked good up close

      i'd argue that the 20 channels of sound would be much less noticably better than the higher re

      • i have to disagree. my folks have a 51" HDTV, and i can still see the pixels. definitely room for improvement.

        consider that a 17" WXGA screen is 1440x900- you could definitely go up to, say, a 50" screen with this resolution and have something really photoreal, even when you're standing up close to it

        Um, you're actually contradicting yourself here. If your parents have a 51" HDTV, it should be able to do 1920x1080, which is quite a bit higher than your "photoreal" 1440x900.

        Now, there's the problem tha

  • regfree link (Score:4, Informative)

    by werdnapk ( 706357 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:19AM (#9343538)
    regfree link here [nytimes.com]

  • Half Rez (Score:3, Funny)

    by koniosis ( 657156 ) <koniosisNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:19AM (#9343539)
    So its half the resolution of a Japanese Television ;)

  • 24 Gb/s (!) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pedantic bore ( 740196 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:21AM (#9343548)
    I don't really need this much fidelity, but I am very interested in the cable modem that comes with this puppy.

    I wonder how long it will be before the local utility offers a 24 Gb/s connection. (of course it will all be for naught if the uploads are still snaily)

    • I wonder how long it will be before the local utility offers a 24 Gb/s connection

      Probably around the same time as when they start bringing fibre to the home.
      • You're probably right, but I'm not so much concerned with the how as with the when. (Monday afternoon works for me!)

        • Same here! Actually, I'm really surprised that the TelCo companies haven't started doing this at a larger scale yet, as it seems that it's the only way they'll be able to compete with the cable companies, especially if VoIP takes off.

  • Monitors First (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Skraut ( 545247 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:24AM (#9343557) Journal
    First of all I'd love to see a monitor with that resolution, but then it only makes sense for a monitor to come first. Look at the development of monitors vs. hdtv. Computer monitors were the first to have the resolutions that HDTV now has simply because it was easier to generate those images locally and send them over a short monitor cable than it is to have the bandwidth to send them over the air, cable or sattelite.

    The power of modern GPU's could be put to use with this resolution, and we could once again have a resolution war between the various chip makers.

    Let's learn to "walk" with images of this resolution, before we try and run.

    • Computer monitors were the first to have the resolutions that HDTV now has

      Hmm. I don't think that's really right. I saw my first 1920x1200 monitor in the mid-1990's, which was well after HDTV became commercially available. (It wasn't cheap or abundant, but it was available.) Before that, 1280x1024 was pretty much the most common resolution, or 1600x1200 if you liked to squint. (21" CRT's can't really resolve that many pixels; they get fuzzy.)

      In this particular case, the TV's beat the computer folks to th
    • Uh, I know Bill Gates didn't say this, but at one time, 640k really was enough for anyone. Obviously we've surpassed that by a factor of 1000 in twenty year's time.

      It took decades for TVs to really take advantage of NTSC resolution, and only in the past decade did they surpass them. As it is, only a few displays can really display HDTV in its full detail, they all have some shortcomming, but it's doable with proper tweaking and not cheaping out.

      IBM has LCD monitors of 4000x3000 resolutions NOW, for scree

  • Rips should look great... (Score:3, Funny)

    by SalsaDot ( 772010 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:27AM (#9343562) Homepage
    ... when the cinemas have this system and the pirates film them with their hidden camcorders.

  • The point is... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lachlan76 ( 770870 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:27AM (#9343563)
    It looks like movies for this are about as useful as the 35TB RAID-0 array they'll come on
    I expect you to give the quote "640k ought to be enough for anyone", and you are right, but by the time anyone can store this much data, we'll probably have holographic projectors, and 3D tv.

    And would you like Ultra-High-Mega-Super-Happy-Fun Resolution 2D tv, or SDTV quality 3D.

    Why do I bother asking....

  • Oh, Great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Obiwan Kenobi ( 32807 ) <(evan) (at) (misterorange.com)> on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:31AM (#9343575) Homepage
    Now George Lucas can let us all see, in the most perfect, clear, awe-inspiring beautiful picture imaginable, Greedo shoot first.

    Damnit!

  • It was great until... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TimTheFoolMan ( 656432 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:38AM (#9343588) Homepage Journal
    ...my kids put in the Ultra Hi Def Barney Video.

    Serenity NOW!

    Tim

  • Well, then no more of that (Score:3, Funny)

    by SlashDotAgent ( 700292 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:38AM (#9343589)
    "16 terabytes ought to be enough for everyone."

  • Why just 60 Hz? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:39AM (#9343594)
    We know that 30/60 Hz from a normal TV causes brain waves that act like a drug. Wouldn't a faster frame rate cause better brain waves; like the ones that actually make us think.

    57 channels and nothing on. Bah humbug!
    • As I understand it, refresh frequencies are normally chosen to be harmonic with the power supply frequency in order to simplify noise suppression circuitry I believe... that's how come NTSC has 30fps (or 29.9whatever) and PAL has 25, because those are half the power supply frequencies in the respective countries of origin.

      I'm not sure if going up to a multiple of the frequency (e.g. 120Hz on a 60Hz supply or 100Hz on 50Hz) would give the same benefits?
      • As I understand it, refresh frequencies are normally chosen to be harmonic with the power supply frequency in order to simplify noise suppression circuitry

        No, it's really much simpler than that. In order to refresh a scanning CRT at a given rate, you have to have a clock that runs at that rate. To keep TV's cheap and simple, they left out the clock and synchronized the vertical scan to the incoming AC. Which, in the US, was 60 Hz, and in the Commonwealth and Europe was 50 Hz.

        When color came along, everyt

  • 12TB/hr? (Score:5, Funny)

    by utexaspunk ( 527541 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:42AM (#9343607)
    well, that's one way to keep people from sharing the files...

    • Of course... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @09:44AM (#9343832) Homepage
      ...When we were doing text, people thought having 100kb pictures would keep them from sharing.
      ...When we were doing pictures, people thought having 3mb music files would keep them from sharing.
      ...When we were doing music, people thought having 100mb applications would keep them from sharing.
      ...When we were doing applications, people thought having 700mb movies would keep them from sharing.
      ...When we were doing movies, people thought having 12TB/hr HDTV would keep them from sharing.

      Information (as in raw bytes/sec) will continue to become cheaper and cheaper. The price of content is quite stable. Add 2+2 and see where it is going. More, faster and more "profitable". I know several people that are probably "millionaires" by now.

      At the estimates for piracy, using the full penalty of the law, the total piracy is more than the GNP of the world - not just this year - but (estimating like a geometric sequence) for all eternity since the dawn of time.

      How's that possible? Simple. We make "money" out of thin air. You give me a million, I give you a million, and we both keep it as well. At $0/content, we could all have all the content in the world. So the loss = 7 billion people * millions of CDs/DVDs/Apps/Games/whatever * full retail price. Yeah. Right.

      Copyright will have to change because pretty soon everyone will have millions in liability - it will simply be common. I've seen it in every age group from 8 to 80, both sexes, all sorts of people. It's bigger than prohibition in the sense that "everybody" is doing it. There's simply no stopping that.

      Kjella
      • You seem to be working from two false assumptions:
        • Everybody pirates.
        • There is nothing wrong with piracy.
        From this, you conclude that we should resolve conflicts and unsustainable situations by changing everything except piracy. The problem here is really point 2- piracy is not defensible, it's just rampant because there is no way to stop it.

  • No bittorrent link? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Saint Stephen ( 19450 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:43AM (#9343613) Homepage Journal
    Anybody got a bittorrent link to the 3.5 terabyte file?

  • Is that the best you can come up with? (Score:5, Funny)

    by zbuffered ( 125292 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:45AM (#9343618)
    What, only 2 dimensions?
  • I need to add some fine detail to my Powerpoint presentations.

  • where? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by netfall ( 721323 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:52AM (#9343643)
    are you going to see this in a home theater setup anytime soon? NO! of course not! this seems to me like it would be more practical for use in the movie theaters. it'd be like the DLP theaters, of which there are only a few dozen around the country.
    Maybe many years from now we'll see it in a home setup... of course it was about 8 years ago when i bought a 1 gig hdd for 200 or 300 bucks (don't remember specifically now) that someone told me "what are you going to use that for? you'll never be able to use all that space!"
    Who's laughing now?

  • I wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Cinquero ( 174242 )
    ... if they'll still use interlacing as they do (in live broadcasts) for HDTV...

  • If it approximates "being there", you could make some mind blowing 3D movies with this technology!

  • Dupe (Score:3, Informative)

    by acoustix ( 123925 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @09:22AM (#9343734)
    This was reported last year UHDV [slashdot.org].
    • Yep. I noticed this too. Do people even bother to search the Slashdot archives to see if it was repeated before posting it? Heh.

  • Media beats reality? (Score:3, Informative)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @09:27AM (#9343756) Homepage
    I'm still waiting for "conventional" high-definition programming to become mainstream. Sure, we now have consumer level HD cameras [jvc.com] but the local news broadcasts are still SD. Alias [go.com] is in HD, and Jennifer Garner [fancube.com] makes my HDTV purchase worth it (don't tell my wife), but every commercial is still in SD.

    The FCC-mandated transition to digital broadcasts probably won't help make HD content mainstream either. Stations may be broadcasting all digital, but they'll still be broadcasting Gilligan's Island [imdb.com] reruns at SD or (gasp) upconverted to 1080i.

    UHDV technology may be the future, but the expense of producing content won't make it mainstream. Oh, and Slashdot covered this before [slashdot.org].

  • [Omni|I]MAX (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @09:30AM (#9343778) Homepage Journal
    I want to see this applied to OmniMAX and IMAX films.

    My biggest problem with [Omni|I]MAX is that at 24fps, scenes with slow pans get very jumpy (fast pans blur enough to not be noticable). However, if you just ran the film at 60fps, the size of the reels would be unmanagiable, and the speed of the film through the transport would be dangerous!

    But imagine a [Omni|I]MAX theater with 100TB of storage (not a big deal nowadays) and a DMD/DLV projector at these kinds of resolutions and refresh rates. They could play any movie they have pretty much instantly, they could have longer running movies, and the movies would be absolutely immersive (esp. for OmniMAX movies - on a 120 degree screen pretty much your entire field of view would be the movie.)

    Of course, they'd need to make sure people understood the "If you feel yourself getting sick, just CLOSE YOUR EYES AND BREATH!" a bit more.
    • 35mm movie film has an effective resolution better than 7200x4800, and IMAX is 10 times better than that. Because film grain sizes and locations have a random distribution, there's no moire or pixelation effects so film is better than digital at the same "resolution". (playing fast and loose with various definitions)

      I can't speak to the audio channels, and I think the frame rate is only 30 fps, but I think *Max wins hands down on resolution.

      Tech notes: IMAX uses "15 hole by 70mm film", but the frames ar
      • 35mm movie film has an effective resolution better than 7200x4800

        Oh, don't be absurd. If you scan a single frame of Super 35 at anything higher than 4K (4096x3112), you're just scanning noise. For all commercial applications short of digital mastering, 2K is as high as you need to go (2048x1556).

  • gah (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Fullmetal Edward ( 720590 )
    I can all ready see every pixel on the bloody screen with my uber TV. Why the hell do I need more pizels to see? When will people relisethat HUGE TVs reduce the quality because most things arn't filmed so they can be shown on a cinema screen -.-
  • The possibility of HDTV in the UK would be nice. We're quite far advanced as far as widescreen and digital TV penetration is concerned, but there aren't any HDTV channels over here at all, and as far as I am aware there are no plans to introduce any...

  • Expo86 (Score:3, Informative)

    by mrdbeaton ( 767108 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @09:55AM (#9343882)
    I saw a 60 fps movie at Expo86 in Vancouver, 18 years ago. It had incredible realism.

    The high frame rate eliminates the strobing effect that occurs when the camera pans, or an object moves quickly across the screen. I noticed the strobing when watching LOTR in the movie theater, but the effect isn't visible on TV.
    • I remember seeing Douglas Trumbull's Showscan system at Expo '85 in Japan--it was breathtakingly clear because the frame rate of the projector was 60 frames per second. The only problem is that the film usage rate borders on hideous because you're running the projector at 2.5 times the normal 24 frames per second rate used by movie projectors.

      There has been a serious attempt improve film movie projection using the MaxiVision format (which runs at 48 frames per second), but between the necessity of needing

  • I get a sense of deja vu (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mjj12 ( 10449 ) <mjj12NO@SPAMbtopenworld.com> on Saturday June 05, 2004 @10:19AM (#9343976) Homepage
    NHK of Japan invented an analogue high definition television system called Muse in the 1970s and 1980s, which looked wonderful compared with standard definition at the time, but its bandwidth requirements were much too high, sets were too expensive, and by the time it got into production it was becoming clear that digital technologies using data compression and consequently that would work using much lower bandwidth and would provide much more in the way of interactive services were viable. So Muse was abandoned and digital services were rolled out.

    For this new system to work, we need much larger bandwidth and/or much better compression than we have now, which in practice means more powerful CPUs than we have now. This will come, but I think this will be a decade or more off. (At that point, any system invented by the Japanese right now will be superceded by something newer invented in the mean time).

    Personally, I like the idea of this new system in principle. It is the first television system I have seen that generates pictures as good or better as conventional film. It will look fabulous if used in a digital cinema. (Current digital cinema technology only uses 1000 lines or so, and this is seriously lacking compared to film)

    As for viewing this in your living room, it is probably overkill, unless we have screens covering entire walls of rooms (which of course we may). The 1080 lines max of conventional HDTV probably is good enough for 40 inch screens and the like. Current generation screens do show various digital artifacts, but these are more to do with the inadequacies of the display technologies than the number of pixels on the screen. (Things like LCD and plasma displays are simply not is good as conventional CRTs in terms of picture quality). Increasing the number of lines in such circumstances will certainly improve the picture further and it will probably happen some day, but larger gains in picture quality can probably be more easily gained in other ways for the moment.
    • Actually, right now the USA standard for high definition projection is 1080-line interlaced or 720-line non-interlaced, which is pretty much equal in picture quality to most human eyes on today's rear-projection TV sets.

      The next leap forward is 1080-line non-interlaced display, which may become available to consumers by 2010. 1080-line non-interlaced is extremely sharp, something like 25 to 50 percent clearer than the current USA standards. Such displays will happen when we get DLP and LCOS rear projection

  • Download speeds (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chiph ( 523845 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @10:27AM (#9344007)
    If my math is right, to download this 18 minute clip over my 256 m/bit/sec cablemodem is around 40 hours.

    So, start download when leaving the house for work on Monday...

    Chip H.

  • Why so many audio channels? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @11:00AM (#9344181) Journal
    I can understand the incredibly high resolution, but why so many audio channels?

    Two channels does quite a good job of reproducing all the sounds of an environment, assuming the stereo speakers are appropriately far apart.

    5.1 channel sound added a sub-woofer, which is a positive development, and then 3 more speakers. Okay, the two rear channels I can understand, because most people don't have their speakers located well, and there's a certain gee-wiz factor in hearing something that is distinctly behind you. However, the center channel still makes little sense to me, since the stereo speakers can handle that area just as well (center channel is usually a crappy little set of treble-only speakers anyhow).

    Now, I am really at a loss to understand why you need even more, especially 20+... Put on a pair of stereo headphones and pick any location, 360 degrees, and I'll make it sound like a noise is comming from that exact spot. So what can 20+ channels do for you?

    Even if we start getting holograms comming out of the screen, I could still make a sound seem like it's comming from whatever position that object is located with just 4 speakers, and I could do a pretty good job with just 2 if needed.
    • Now, I am really at a loss to understand why you need even more, especially 20+... Put on a pair of stereo headphones and pick any location, 360 degrees, and I'll make it sound like a noise is comming from that exact spot. So what can 20+ channels do for you?

      No, I doubt you will. Assuming you're just planning to crossfade between the right and left channel. When sound enters the human ear, the amplitudes of various frequencies are affected by the direction the sound came from. For example (and this is

      • No, I doubt you will. Assuming you're just planning to crossfade between the right and left channel.

        No, actually it's more than that. It's really a matter of getting dual microphones positioned correctly, then recording sounds you make, relative to the microphones.

        For instance, if a sound is comming from in-front of you, but off to the left, then you'll hear it in your left ear an instant before your right. By exaggerating the spacing a bit, it sounds much clearer where the noise is comming from. Now,

    • You can emulate a center with stereo, but only from a small sweet spot. A good center is still needed for all the people that sit off-axis. IIRC, you can't do head-related transfer functions from stereo speakers very well, and they don't fool everyone even with headphones, I suspect because everyone has slightly different ears.

      Twenty two channels may seem like overkill, but I won't write it off just yet. It's only till people experience it when people can truly tell what they have isn't everything. I ex

    • Re:Why so many audio channels? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anm ( 18575 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @02:29PM (#9345209)
      2 channels only works well if you have headphones and massive amounts of on-the-fly processing (I believe it remains more than today's top-of-the-line PC's & consumer soundcards), and even then it isn't perfect. Others have replied about the frequency changes from in front/behind/above/below. But there are also variations in ear shape that each individual ('s brain) has become tuned too. And your comment about headphones + 360 degree sound doesn't address the fact that we live in a 3D environment, nor the problem of localization in the face of multiple competing sounds.

      And that doesn't even get into the social isolation headphones encourage. For the majority of settings, it is better to have multi-channel surround sound for an area that can encompass a group rather than a stack of headphones (and the sound processors that come with that).

      Your comments about center channel are also misled. The center channel is a tremble speaker so it projects voices from the center/screen area best. Panning voices between front left/right can causes the voices to seem off screen and can be very distracting to some people.

      So now you ask, what is my background? I do VR environments in colaboration with these people: http://imsc.usc.edu/research/project/immersiveaudi o/immersiveaudio_tech.pdf

  • Human Eye = 17,000 DPI (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05, 2004 @11:07AM (#9344219)
    Pixels and Resolutions

    name Herbert
    status educator
    age 60s

    Question - Presently there is quite a bit of talk about pixels. Each
    digital camera manufacrer claims there camera has 3 million pixels,
    another 3.5 million, on and on. This reminds me of the 50's & 60's when
    Hi-Fi audio manufacturers claimed there equipment had a wider bandwidth
    than its competitor. So the question is what is the resolution of the
    human eye, and can the figure be quoted in pixels?

    I will answer as much as I can, but your questions about the limits of the
    human eye should really be directed to a specialist in the theoretical
    limits of the human eye. Right now that is a question that has been
    researched quite well, and there are several formulas to help predict that.

    From what I understand, the resolution of the human eye is not measured
    directly in pixels, but by the angular difference between two points of
    light that can be resolved. Here is a very good article on that:

    http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/may9 7/864446241.Ph.r.html

    From this article, if I have done the math right, I understand that a
    typical person has a maximum resolution of about 17000 point sources per
    inch. This doesn't really equate to pixels, but, pixels can be changed into
    pixels per inch, and that should be close enough.

    Digital cameras do brag about their resolution, because, well, it really
    does matter. It matters because their resolution is so poor compared to a
    real cameras, or a decent printer that it is pathetic.

    For example, a really good digital camera might have a resolution of 2160 x
    1440. If you made that into a 4x5 picture, you have a resolution of about
    400 pixels per inch. Which isn't bad, but photo quality printers print at
    2400 pixels per inch. If you decided to make it into a 8x10 photo, you end
    up with about 200 pixels per inch. This was considered excellent quality 10
    years ago, but is very poor quality by todays standards.

    So, compared to the human eye, a real camera, or good printed material,
    digital cameras aren't there yet. They do use a wide variety of software to
    try and enhance the quality for printing, but there is still room for
    improvement.

    That doesn't mean digital cameras don't have a use. If you need pictures in
    a digital form to be displayed on computer screens, then you have something.
    A computer screen has a resolution of about 72 pixels per inch, and digital
    cameras are definitely better than that. Also, since it is basically one
    step from taking the picture to downloading it onto your computer, you get
    better results than if you took a picture, developed it, and then scanned it
    in, not to mention much faster results. With the popularity of the web,
    digital cameras are great for creating images to place on a web site.

    I hope this helps.
    --Eric Tolman

    http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/may 97/864446241.Ph.r.html

    From this article, if I have done the math right, I understand that a
    typical person has a maximum resolution of about 17000 point sources per
    inch. This doesn't really equate to pixels, but, pixels can be changed
    into pixels per inch, and that should be close enough.

    It would seem to me that if the resolution of the human eye is one
    arcminute at 10 inches, then the maximum resolution of the human eye is
    found as follows:

    You find the circumference of a circle of radius 10 inches, which comes to
    62.83 inches. One 1/21600th (or 1/60th of a degree) of this is 0.002908
    inches, the minimum possible perceptible distance by the human eye at 10
    inches.

    To get this much resolution, you need 343, not 17,000 pixels per inch.

    Of course if you get even closer, the story changes, but what the
    resolution of the human eye is at some other point that 10 inches I am not
    sure.

    Even taking a hypothetical one inch of distance with the exact same eye
    resol
  • This was shown publicly last year, and published in September 2003 [e4engineering.com].

    Super high resolution monitors have been done before, but usually as CRTs. Greyscale CRTs are easy to make, and have been used for medical X-ray viewing [clintonelectronics.com], where 5-megapixel displays are often used. The medical monitor makers are now offering 5-megapixel greyscale LCD panels. Color panels still have lower resolutions.

  • An A-size engineering drawing sheet is 48 x 36 inches (Metric A4 is slightly different, but similar). Paper is capable of better, but useful detail on a drawing is around 200 dpi. This means that a single engineering drawing is about 9600 x 7200 pixels = 69,840,000 pixels. Of course, these aren't moving images.

    IMHO 200 dpi is about right for viewing without noticeable digitizing effects - moire, rasters, etc. Pencil lines at this resolution don't have visible jaggies if they're antialiased, and don't look out of focus either.
  • As we improve the details of displays, some will believe that we're nearing the specs of our eyes, and that we're "almost done". Keep in mind that these displays are not symmetrical emitters to our eyes' receivers. Their pixels are on a grid, which our eyes can see as a regular array, while our retinal receptors are in a radial organization, stochastically displaced ("pseudorandom"). And the retinal cell layout is as different for each person as their fingerprints (actually much more so, but also unique). O
  • SuperHyperMaxiUltraHigh Definition Video! A 2-hour movie takes 950 Tb of storage, and transmission requires 256 2-Gbit channels. With no system in the world capable of handling it, this standard will finally put an end to video piracy!

  • great, that's like having a ferrari (Score:3, Insightful)

    by waspleg ( 316038 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @02:10PM (#9345108) Journal
    to be stuck in traffic with every day

    seriously, tv doesn't have enough decent CONTENT to use something like this, my roommate has a 36" hdtv and we cancelled the hdtv package from comcast becuase there is literally nothing to watch and it's pointless to pay an extra $35+ for hi res newscasts

    the only place the hdtv shines so far is in showing cg scenes (return of the king is fucking amazing on the tv for example, much better than it was in the theater) but nothing else really improves so the question is begged why bother?

    could it be that they're trying to outpace moore's law? how many people have multi-terrabyte beowulf clusters set up to manipulate video that massive?

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