I've been waiting to see what the newest/latest addition of TV's would be. I know they began their 3D phase again, it's just not really catching on. As such, enter 4K televisions with a 3840 x 2160 resolution (In comparison to 1920 x 1080, for 1080i/1080p televisions). The kicker? There's always a kicker, Sony has various variations of the television. There biggest is an 84 inch screen set to be released in September of this year for $25,000. They have smaller versions for around $5,000. If I get one, I'd go for the Seiki version that's going to be on sale for $1,500. http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/05/sonys-84-inch-4k-bravia-on-sale-for-$25k/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/07/sony-4k-tv-pricing/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/15/seiki-offcially-prices-its-50-inch-4k-tv-at-1500-for-late-april/ Thoughts?
that Seiki was on sale last week at tigerdirect for $1200 last week, still on shopnbc for $1300 right now I don't think its worth buying one since there is no content available in 4k. Its like buying an elephant bidet without owning an elephant, you have no use for it. http://slickdeals.net/f/5961362-Seiki-50-4k-LED-TV-at-TigerDirect-3840x2160-1199-99-shipped
I remember when LED televisions of that size were pulling 25k. Give it a few years and we'll all have one I can't wait! I hope they release movies in their original 4K/8K resolutions. Just get it over with and make an 8K format. We only need 16x the capacity of current storage media. There's not much point having like... Bluray 4K and THEN making us all upgrade again to Bluray 8K as I guess the final format, but I'm sure this is how Sony will do it.
LED screens do have a serious drawback no one seems to be discussing. They can only cover a limited range of color, and in addition the blues appear to be rather harsh. The problem is that most of the TVs are just using simple "white" LEDs, which are actually deep blue LED chips with some yellowish-orange phosphor. Better LED technology designs will probably eventually be developed, but I doubt they will solve all the problems any time soon. If you want to open up an LED TV and try to improve it yourself, it probably would not be too difficult. An LED TV is just an LCD screen with LED backlighting. So take out the LED backlighting and replace it with electroluminescent film or something, or some hybrid combination. complicated subject, cannot get into it all
Agreed, it's still too new. However, I'm still surprised they've developed something better than what we have right now. Granted, I knew it wasn't going to last forever but it's still amazing it's already out.
Yeah, I can't wait for this to be cheap as well. Eventually programming will be made available for this. To me, it's seems like when the PS3 first came out, no one could use all what the console had within it and it took years for a game to even come close to tapping it out. Even now, most games don't even use all of the PS3's potential.
Well to be fair games aren't designed to meet the PS3's potential, but to meet the sacrifices that have to be made in the development process. Very few developers will spend as much time on the graphics as say... those of Killzone. Personally I think the time and money is better invested on the story and characters. For example, LA Noire looks below average graphically, but they spent a solid 5 years developing the game mechanics and the characters so I feel that it's one of the best. The important thing with a new console generation is that it pushes the standard that much further ahead, so that devs can more easily make games that look like Crysis and Killzone without spending a mint optimizing them.
Fair enough. However, most graphics are ran through applications, like GIMP, to lower their quality. Thus, even the most extravagant games have their quality lowered. This could be for various reasons, one is usually the size of the disc. Moreover to my point, I think technology is moving faster than those that benefit from it, the most, can keep up. 3D, even though has, technically, been around for years, still has yet to catch on. For me, I enjoy watching technology press forward. However, I think it's gotten to where they're worried about the money more than anything else. That's when I think about, when I was in programming school, being told that if you only want to make video games to make money, you're never going to succeed. Sure, you'll make a ton of money, but the games you make won't be the best they could be. When you make it a passion, the games will take on a form of it's own. If that same philosophy is used across the board in technology, I think a lot of things could be a lot better than they are.
I think nothing puts out a signal anything close to this, and it is a gimmick. I am also about over the clarity of HD... frankly. People begin to look grotesque on a gigantic screen close up. I don't know how clearly I need to see the poc marks and bullet scars on that porn stars... er... I don't want to see Dianne Sawyers blackheads. I have noticed they have started doing the old Star Trek trick of putting Vaseline on the lens to try and blur her up a little... Ok so they have a bit more of a budget than Star Trek did... they are using filters. Without soft light and filtering... It is funny when she is doing an interview with someone on the right... she stays fuzzy and they get the "a little too real" contrast filters. Anyway... There is no point to this for me. I don't want media getting any bigger in size anyway.
Never. That's not a valid aspect ratio. Besides, why would you want a fullscreen TV? Widescreen is vastly superior.
Sure it is. It just uses rectangular pixels with a 2:3 aspect ratio For watching the fullscreen content that accounts for 99% of everything that has ever been committed to film or video. Also, watching fullscreen DVDs of widescreen movies, which shouldn't exist but do anyway because some people don't know what the word "anamorphic" means but still somehow got jobs encoding DVDs. False.
That's not exactly how it works. Physically, neither 2:1 or 3:2 has ever been an aspect ratio used by a television. Old analog TVs didn't have pixels at all, but rather scanlines, and digital HD TVs always use square pixels. The image displayed on screen may be comprised of rectangular pixels (especially when displaying an SD image), but that's a different issue. SD TVs were 4:3 (1.33:1), and HD is 16:9 (1.78:1). (I started to write a lengthy response explaining various aspect ratios, display vs image, etc, but there's just too much info and I don't have the energy right now. Instead, I cut it down to the essential points above, and you can research the rest on your own.) False. Various widescreen formats have been used as the standard since the early to mid 50's. Today (and for several decades), film is almost exclusively either 1.85:1 or 2.40:1 (and sometimes 1.66:1 in some European countries). It seems as though you are speaking from the perspective of a home TV watcher. Until HDTV, video was always shown in the fullscreen format you are describing (excluding anamorphic DVDs). However, the content was not created in that format, but rather cropped and/or scaled specifically to fit. When this is done, you are losing vast amounts of image data and no longer viewing the content as it was meant to be viewed. I should clarify that I have been referring to film content. Video specifically shot for television programming has more content designed to be fullscreen, although only up until the early-ish 90's, when widescreen/digital technologies started moving in. Even before that, most TV was still filmed in a standard widescreen format (similar to movies) then cropped down to size (until you get back to the really old stuff). Agreed. I used to refuse to buy DVDs unless they specified "anamorphic" on the back. Non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs were horrendous. *shudder* Sorry, but you're wrong. SD content and "fullscreen" aspect ratios have been in the process of being phased out of the home setting for years (which never really existed outside the home since before the 50s's). Given that the filming standard for about 60 years has been widescreen formats, and the current and future state of electronics, it is an entirely objective statement when I say that widescreen is superior to fullscreen. ... and I haven't even gotten into how widescreen better relates to human vision (more horizontal peripheral vision than vertical).
How many times do we replaced perfecty good televisions, phones, computers, music formats etc....just to get the latest greatest. The electonics industry is pro at separating monkies from their money. Any shiny new thing will work.
Dude, save your breath. I've been doing digital video editing for the past ten years. I know what I'm talking about. Movies like Citizen Kane and the Wizard of Oz were shot in fullscreen. Movie theaters showed them in fullscreen when they were released. When TV was invented, a decision was made to make them in 4:3 specifically because that's the ratio that movies were already being made in. However, Hollywood perceived television as a threat to ticket sales, so they invented a bunch of different widescreen ratios specifically so that movies that were made in these ratios would be incompatible with TV sets. However, the film stock didn't change. Some movies continued to be filmed in "4-perf" (i.e., 4 perforations per film frame) and then had the top and bottom cropped for theaters. This was called "open matte". Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) was filmed in this way. Other movies were filmed in 3-perf to produce... you know what? F*ck it. I'm right, you're wrong, end of debate.
You're not the only one with experience in this field (though I sort of question your claim, given your views). I am aware of all of this, none of which changes anything I've said. Plus, open matte/4-perf isn't used as much any more specifically due to the standardization of widescreen TVs (and it's cheaper). Of course, the growing trend of filming digitally makes this moot. It doesn't matter anyway, here's the bottom line... all facets of the entire industry have moved away from fullscreen (most, decades ago). You seem to be the only one grasping to hold on to an old and technically inferior format. Wow, I didn't know one could just declare "end of debate" and everything suddenly works in their favor. To hell with facts and logic, I'm just going to do this from now on! You may subjectively prefer the fullscreen format, and that's fine, but given everything else, it's not objectively better. Oh, and you should learn to calm the (*)(*)(*)(*) down. Have a nice day.
Fullscreen displays are objectively better because they are compatible with a much larger share of all media content that has ever been produced. Widescreen displays aren't even compatible with most widescreen content; a movie filmed in 2.35:1 will have black bars at the top and bottom whether you're watching it on a 4:3 screen or a 16:9 screen. Compatibility is the only thing that matters here. Hollywood's original decision to make films incompatible with TV screens was an error, the decision to alter TV standards to accommodate Hollywood's idiocy instead of forcing Hollywood to come to its senses was an error, and perpetuating an error only makes it worse, not better.
I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. You're only used to seeing content being displayed in fullscreen, because that's what TVs have been up until recently. Even content filmed in full frame 4-perf is usually not meant to be viewed as such, and subsequently gets matted. You can see this by comparing the widescreen and fullscreen versions of a movie on DVD. In almost every case, the fullscreen version uses pan & scan instead of vertically opening the frame matting back up. Do you know why? Because even though the extra vertical resolution may exist on the original film stock, it is extraneous and not meant to be seen. I'll even give you an example. One exception to the above is Austin Powers 2, they actually removed the matting for the fullscreen version instead of using pan & scan - in error. You can see this in a scene near the end where Dr. Evil gives Mini Me a shot on his butt. It is implied that Mini Me has his pants pulled down, which in the widescreen version you don't see as it's just off the bottom of the frame. But in the fullscreen version, you can see that he's actually wearing pants but still fakes pulling them back up after receiving the shot. It's a glaring error, because that portion of the frame was never meant to be viewed. I agree that, in general, forcing different standards between the two was a bad thing. This I do not agree with. In fact, the TV standard should have changed to match Hollywood's widescreen standard MUCH sooner.
Comon. Most people don't upgrade their T.V. for 5+ years. most everyone has had a flatscreen 1080p one for 6 years at this point. These high res ones will start to become affordable in the coming years and then most will upgrade. Advances in TV doesn't happen nearly as fast as in the mobile or PC world.
