We all made the shift to HD. The whole TV industry is now geared towards that: From 1080p cameras, to 720p resolutions on mere smartphone devices. There have been talks recently about going 4K--essentially quadrupling the amount of pixels in the moving image industry. But is it really necessary? Will it be another fad, similar to 3D televisions?
When I attended CES a few years back, the new trends were obvious:
* Switching from LCD to LED
* Going for 120 Hertz and 240 Hertz televisions, for no apparent reason
* 3D televisions
* Gesture control
Out of the above, only the switch to LED happened. More than 60 Hertz doesn't have any reasonable use case yet. 3D wasn't received and adopted that well, and gesture control in a lean-back environment just doesn't work.
Is 4K going to be different or will it suffer the same fate? Let's review some opinions and trends shaping the 4K-industry.
The Missing Use Case
The main problem with more resolution on our displays is one of finding the use case. Here are a few that come to mind:
Watching Movies
Geoffrey Morisson wrote on CNET that 4K TVs are stupid:
"But with televisions, 4K is stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. For every one of you thinking you'll rearrange your living room to sit closer to the screen, I'm positive there are thousands of others who wouldn't (or wouldn't be allowed to).
"Sure screen sizes are going up, but how many of you are really going to put an 85-inch screen in your home, and sit close enough to it for 4K to matter?
"Sure screen sizes are going up, but how many of you are really going to put an 85-inch screen in your home, and sit close enough to it for 4K to matter?
He is correct, if you look at today's use of a living room display (I am deliberately not calling it a TV). The problem I have with this view is that it takes today's assumptions on consumption and deduces from that the success of a technology that has ways to go to become pervasive.
Video Conferencing
Here on NoJitter, Phil Edholm sees real opportunity for 4K displays:
"The point is that for video conferencing, bigger displays are generally better, unless you are sitting too close. 4K displays solve that issue."
So we now have a use case: take those expensive video conferencing room systems and find a reason for them to stay expensive. You increase resolution, require better cameras, more bandwidth and of course the codec being sold needs to stay expensive. How else will this industry keep its margins?
If this is the only use case, then the 4K display is doomed already.
The Future in Glass
Have you seen Corning’s "A Day Made in Glass 2"?
In it, displays are placed on every conceivable surface. You interact with them through touch and gesture. And most of it makes sense--it looks like a "small" leap of faith and a couple of engineering feats.
If you go to a wall mounted display--that is pretty much the whole wall--there are a lot of things you can now do with it, from watching TV on a "small" 50" area, showing mockup scenery to fit your mood; to telepresence or just showing information in smaller parts depending on the person in front of the display and his distance from it.
Now, that use case requires more pixels than we have today in HD.
Next Page: Economies of Scale
Economies of Scale
A compelling use case will win the day. If there is one industry that requires more resolution and that industry is big enough, it will simply trump the rest. Due to the need for economies of scale, display and component manufacturers will adopt such a technology and embed it into the majority of their production lines.
You see, even if it doesn't make sense for watching movies in the living room, within a few years, more resolution won't cost more--it will cost less from a manufacturing point of view.
Retina
To some extent, we already are in a Post-HD era and on our way to 4K displays. Apple's latest products come with their signature Retina displays.
The new iPad has 2048x1536 resolution.
The new MacBook Pro comes with 2880x1800 resolution display.
Others will follow and probably will try to offer higher resolutions still. Does it make sense? Can people see the difference? There are those who believe so.
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror wants to see larger desktop displays now that he owns a new iPad:
"iPad 3 reviews that complain 'all they did was improve the display' are clueless bordering on stupidity. Tablets are pretty much by definition all display; nothing is more fundamental to the tablet experience than the quality of the display. These are the first iPads I've ever owned (and I'd argue, the first worth owning), and the display is as sublime as I always hoped it would be. The resolution and clarity are astounding, a joy to read on, and give me hope that one day we could potentially achieve near print resolution in computing. The new iPad screen is everything I've always wanted on my desktops and laptops for the last 5 years, but I could never get."
Colin Berkshire on TalkingPointz complains that after the new iPad he can't look at other monitors:
"I never realized how hard my brain had to work to make out the text on an ordinary LCD display. The brain is an amazing signal processor and it can handle the image smoothing and character recognition. But it clearly is gobbling up a lot of brain-CPU cycles to accomplish that task. I would rather those cycles be spent on problem solving or things of value to my company."
How much time will pass until people start comparing the resolution and clarity of their tablets and mobile devices with large TV screens? Would they demand more pixels then?
1 Gbps Networks
Networks are getting faster. As such, they are capable of offering more. Carriers are struggling to get us addicted to our data, and it seems that video does the job pretty well: it hogs up our monthly bills.
A single HD stream requires 6-8 Mbps of bandwidth to stream nicely, making IPTV work best at 50 Mbps contracts or higher (remember--multiple televisions at home, with recording happening in parallel).
How do you get people to go higher than say 100 Mbps in bandwidth? What use case can entice them? More frames or more resolution will fit the bill here, making 4K movies a boon to carriers in a few years' time.
