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What is Super High Definition?

By Darco | September 19, 2011

When HD TV arrived on the market, the publicity said that it was the finest image that we could produce, at the time, of course this was accurate, but in just a handful of years, the technology has taken another enormous step forward.

Part of the reason for this, of course, is the interest that broadcasters have shown in HD, and the public have followed suit. Some of the biggest television companies have launched channels like Sky HD, and customers have eagerly bought new, often large, HD screens.

The next step, however, has arrived, and it’s arrived with a camera that can produce an image that so far, no television on the planet is able to accurately reproduce. The Japanese public broadcaster NHK has developed a camera that produces images in an astonishing 16 times higher quality than the best that current HD offers.

The signal comes through in no less than 7680 by 4320 pixels. Compared to that the best, full HD screen, on the market at the moment offers around 1920 by 1080, meaning that it can only show a quarter of all the information available.

Of course, the problem with such an enormous image is that it needs a really enormous processing system to deal with the images, and NHK have developed that as well. Unfortunately, the rest of the television network isn’t capable of dealing with such images, so it could be a fair few years before super HD becomes a broadcasting norm.

Between now and then lies the 2012 Olympics, and there are hopes that some test screenings could be shown in super high definition at one of the several fan sites that are going to be based around London. These sites will use big screens which are more likely to be able to handle the image, though they won’t reproduce everything as well as a specially made HD TV would be able to.

With technology developing all the time, it’s hard to imagine what televisions will be like from one year to the next, HD, 3D, maybe even holographic image by the end of the decade? It’s not a bad choice to have.

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