January 10th, 2007
Westinghouse Unveils 2160p “Quad” HDTV
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
While the rest of CES seemed focused on mainstreaming the next level of HDTV - 1080p - a tiny booth from Westinghouse was quietly showing off 2160p or “Quad” HDTV. Before you get all worked up, the technology was being targeted to high end industrial applications and not consumers, but as all technology eventually trickles down, you can certainly see where this is heading.
Specs
Quad HDTV means a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels or 8.3 megapixels. That is four times 1080p, hence the quad name. The gang from Tom’s Hardware checked out the demo of an oil rig mining system shown here, but felt that while the quad’s resolution blew away cheaper 1080p displays, it was not ground-breaking enough to warrant the mega price tag, epecially when compared to some of the better 1080p units on display at the conference. (Westinghouse gave no price. If you have to ask….)
Bottom Line: Blu Ray and HD DVD discs max out at 1080p, so even if you had all the money in the world, there is little use for a Quad HDTV system today. Here’s hoping the doubling of an existing standard makes the industry move faster to full scale 1080p (the word interlace makes us wince.)
John Corliss says:
Yeah, well before the industry moves to a higher resolution standard, they should work on preventing motion artifacts on existing HDTVs running 1080p. Every one I’ve looked at has them. Very distracting when trying to watch a football game.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Jim Frost says:
There are so many possible places that what you’re seeing could be coming from that it’s hard to detail them all. Most likely, though, you are seeing one or more of the following three:
1. Live compression of video to MPEG still leaves something to be desired, it’s not really optimal, and the shortcuts they need to take are worst with fast-motion.
2. Broadcast bandwidth restrictions mean that it may be difficult or impossible to render finest detail when the whole frame is changing fast, even if the MPEG encoder is up to snuff.
3. If you’re using cable or satellite as an HD source your provider may be recompressing the video to reduce bandwidth.
I have seen all three of these in practice with sports broadcasts.
But there are other possibilities too; if it’s a 1080p set then it must be doing deinterlacing and the deinterlacing hardware/software varies quite dramatically in performance (and sometimes even within the same model lines, eg Samsung HLN437 versus HLN347W).
Personally I don’t see the point of buying a super-high-resolution set for television viewing any time soon, there just aren’t any sources that could take much advantage of it. But I would /love/ one for image editing. That thing will display almost the whole image from a run-of-the-mill DSLR at native resolution. Almost.
January 10th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Ike says:
I have a Westinghouse 1080p set. I love it. I’ve noticed any artifacting is the result of the compression my cable provider is putting on the thing, I can watch high res movies on it without the same effects as I see on cable sports broadcasts when it comes to motion.
I bought my set after checking out quite a few 1080p screens, and deciding that Westinghouse’s 1080p’s had better pictures than some of the MUCH more expensive offerings from Sony, etc.
I’m sure this Quad screen is quite stunning.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
David Johnston says:
I’m going to put this in the “really cool things that we probably won’t be able to buy for another 5 years” category.
It is really cool though!
January 10th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
C.Anderson says:
While the eyes have about 576 megapixels per eye, they are only able to distingous between pixels 1mm wide at six feet away.
January 10th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
ZCZC says:
窃听器
August 8th, 2008 at 1:05 am