LAS VEGAS – Are you hearing drumbeat of Ultra HDTV yet? I am. The question is whether this is “The Music Man” overture or a solo bongo player on a street corner in the East Village.
Seriously, this long developing "trend" has yet to reach full force. Nonetheless, the emerging technology designed to bring video in super high resolution with four times the pixels of current 1080p HDTV is the topic destined to be hyped, dissected and hotly debated at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.
Sure, video on Ultra HDTV is nothing short of breathtaking. CES 2012 offered a taste of it at several booths, including Sharp and Sony.
Ultra HDTV, sometimes known as 4K x 2K, offers video in 3,840 × 2,160 pixels of resolution. The standard’s spec first released by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) in 2007 also has been approved by ITU, with its UHDTV standard allowing 24, 25, 60 and 120 frames per second. The UHDTV video production systems -- including cameras and encoder systems – have been designed and developed. Some venues at the London Olympics last year were shot in UHDTV.
