In the ensuing year, and continuing with CES 2014, the hype has been nonstop, coincident with many significant developments in the technology, the marketing and the price point. Walk into just about any Best Buy store, and you’ll see 4K televisions from Sony, Samsung, Sharp, Panasonic and more — all offering 3840×2160 pixels (eight megapixels), incredible resolution and an equally incredible price. Walk into any movie theater, and you just might see a lengthy promo for Sony 4K televisions right before they show the coming attractions.
The Low and High End
Since the grand intro, the price for 4K televisions has both gone up and gone down. At the low end (based on a quick scan of Amazon.com), a company called Seiki Digital offers a 39-inch model for $499 and a 50-inch model for $899. In the upper mid-range (still beyond my pocketbook), Sony offers a 55-inch model for $2,998 and an 84-inch model for $24,990. At the ultra-high end, Samsung (bless their hearts) offers an 85-inch model for $40,000. (Side note —if you want a wonderful, hearty and sarcastic laugh, please go to Amazon.com and read the comments for this particular television.)
Regardless, 4K is indeed catching on slowly in several areas. For example, our friends at Fox Sports Network are using 4K cameras and 4K replay systems for football and other sports telecasts. This enables the director to call for a replay, and have the replay operator zoom in on a particular region of the action — without any loss of resolution. Essentially (at home), we’re seeing an HD window within the full 4K raster, and the results are very effective.
4K Apps – From the Boardroom to the Desktop
The digital signage community is starting to cozy up to 4K, with the realization that one large 4K monitor (84-inch diagonal, for example), is a lot better than a 2×2 video wall comprised of four narrow bezel HD monitors — and the price for an industrial 4K is surprisingly similar to four HD screens. In this configuration, advertisers get all the resolution of a 2×2, without the visual inconvenience of the monitor bezels.
In the corporate boardroom, 4K is also making inroads. Businesses are replacing overhead projectors with beautiful 4K monitors, enabling a dramatic increase in brightness, clarity and visibility — not to mention a very impressive splash for prospective clients. Often dubbed the “boardroom of the future,” these 4K conference rooms offer an improved workspace for collaboration, teleconferencing and decision-making. Companies such as RGB Spectrum offer windowing solutions that enable multiple users to display simultaneous content on the 4K raster, and companies such as Prysm offer high-resolution solutions that include multi-touch, motion and interaction.
Ultra HD is also moving to the desktop, not just for business purposes, but also for gaming. Dell, ASUS, Sharp and other major manufacturers are now offering 4K monitors in the 28-inch to 32-inch diagonal range — each of which brings pinpoint clarity to the desktop workstation (and reasonably affordable, as well). Connectivity from the PC to the monitor is typically via DisplayPort, which can handle the high bandwidth required to paint eight megapixels on screen. For professional video editors, photographers, graphic designers and Photoshop wizards working with high-resolution content, this would be a “must have” addition to the studio. For my two cents, 4K may in fact catch on here much faster than it will in the family entertainment center.
More Apps – From Gaming to Cinema
The gaming community is also moving into the 4K domain, as both Xbox and PS4 are promising 4K in their future based on customer demand. Hand in hand, the manufacturers of high-end video cards such as AMD and Nvidia are currently making pricey (yet powerful) video cards that can drive 4K displays. All you gamers — please be patient.
At this point, the rental and staging industry has not come around to embrace 4K, although 4K projectors are often used for high brightness applications and to provide coverage for large screen surfaces. From an economic standpoint, though, HD is serving our industry quite well.
Stock footage companies such as Shutterstock and Mammoth HD™ are now creating libraries of 4K content, much of it shot on cameras manufactured by Red Digital Cinema — the Red One®, Scarlet®, and Epic®. To this end, episodic television programs and major motion pictures continue to be shot in 4K, and edited in HD for release. This workflow started long before the grand CES intro, but the difference now is that affordable 4K monitors are available for the desktop video professional.
So, in terms of real and emerging 4K applications, we have sports, digital signage, the boardroom of the future, stock footage, and 4K workstations for video and graphic professionals.
A Light on the Horizon
In terms of 4K content, sadly, there’s still a void. Consumers who bought the 4K Sony have (by now) watched their ten 4K movies that they received gratis with the purchase, as played back on their proprietary 4K mini-servers. Unconfirmed reports say that these folks are also able to download more 4K movies, since Sony conveniently owns the film library. But the rest of the 4K ownership community has little or no content. They are happily upscaling all of their content to the full 4K raster, and waiting patiently for the industry to come around. I’m sure that it looks gorgeous, but it’s still HD on a 4K surface.
But wait, there’s a light on the horizon! Netflix and other streaming media companies are promising to roll out 4K delivery services in 2014, with a subscription price to be determined. This streaming service will put 4K into our living rooms, aided by amazing advances in compression algorithms — one of which is called HEVC, otherwise known as H.265. HEVC stands for High Efficiency Video Coding, and the compression wizards are (as we speak) putting the final touches on its rollout, with the hopes of full standardization this year. HEVC is designed to replace the ubiquitous H.264, with a significant improvement in video quality, and a significant drop in the bit rate required for transmission. To the layman, this means that a higher quality signal, with four times the data, can be sent through the same tiny Internet pipe that now delivers your HD signal. This advance will change the entire dynamics of 4K.
The Digital OR
Working quietly in the background for many years now is perhaps the most valid application for 4K of all — and we have to travel to the medical world to find it. Radiologists have been diagnosing and examining ultra-high definition X-rays for years, using 4K (and higher) resolution monitors in both color and monochrome, and medical technicians have also been reading the results of mammograms using 4K monitors.
But now, with the advent of large-scale 4K monitors certified for use in surgical suites, Ultra HD is taking another step forward in medicine. Video has been used in the operating room (OR) for years, but banks of individual monitors are employed — typically in a 2×3 array. These monitors show patient data, vital signs, the surgeon’s hi-res forehead mounted camera, video from a tiny endoscope and more. It’s all quite remarkable, but the bezels in-between the monitors are visually obtrusive for the surgeons and technicians. An Ultra HD monitor plus an advanced windowing system changes all that, with an eight megapixel workspace — and no bezels. They’re calling it the digital OR.
One year down the line from the grand 4K intro at CES 2013, much has happened in the land of 4K — some of it expected, and some of it quite surprising. We’ll check back circa 2015, and see if those 4K gamers have gotten their wish.
