James Delahunty
29 May 2007 19:21
Right now, having a TV that is capable of 1080p is what many people are after due to its sharp and clear quality while playing back Full HD content. While most people generally don't have a HDTV, Japan's public broadcaster Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) is already developing what it hopes will serve as successor to HDTV. Super-Hi-Vision (SHV) is what the company has come up with.
Many of you have already seen details on its development (remember UHDV?). An SHV image has an astonishing resolution of 4,320 horizontal lines and 7,680 vertical lines (7680x4320). If you have an excellent working brain and have not already seen these figures, you might have noticed they are exactly 4 times that of whats considered Full HD, 1920x1080. Speaking in terms of pixels, it has 16 times the number of pixels compared to Full HD.
NHK demonstrated some important developments in its research on Friday, including a new image sensor for use in TV cameras that can shoot an entire SHV screen. NHK demonstrated capturing an entire SHV screen with a single sensor. A scene was setup about 3 meters away which included a newspaper. On a monitor displaying the image, the newspaper stories could be read easily, a task that would be very difficult with today's high definition systems.
There are a lot of technical problems to work out with a system such as this. An uncompressed SHV signal has a bit-rate of 24Gbps, meaning broadcast systems fall short. Even with the compression option, real-time encoding and decoding of such a high-bandwidth signal is a challenge. NHK and Fujitsu Ltd. linked 16 encoders in parallel, compressing an SHV signal to around 1/200th of its size using MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression.
This resulted in an SHV image of 128Mbps, which is still about 6 times the bandwidth of today's high-definition broadcasting in Japan. NHK once demonstrated UHDV with 18 minutes of footage, about 3.5TB in size, projected on a 4x7 meter screen. The extremely high resolution and refresh rate of 60fps (along with 22.2ch audio) captured reality so well, it made viewers feel physically sick, due to the motion on-screen.
Source:
Yahoo