Beyond HDTV?
Dan Ramer over at DVDFile has another interesting article. This time he discusses whether or not HDTV is enough. Is HDTV at the point where we can’t see more? Is it at our limit of visual acuity, or is there more beyond 1920 x 1080? I’ll give you a big huge hint:
Hmmm. Apparently the eyeball can perceive much finer detail than we enjoy with high definition. My 8-foot wide home theater screen is positioned for about a 42-degree wide field of view. But if I can perceive 0.59 arc minutes, I’d need 8542 pixels across the screen to reach my limit of visual acuity (42 * 60 / 0.59 = 4271 line-pairs or 8542 pixels). But even the Digital Cinema Initiative 4K specification calls for only 4096 x 2160 pixels. So it’s safe to say that vision is far better than today’s high definition or tomorrow’s digital cinema. Does that matter?
Does that whet your appetite? There’s a lot more over at DVDFile.com.
Check out our new sister blog on Home Theater, HTBlog.net
August 11th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Without reading the article, who has an 8-foot-wide home theater screen?
August 11th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
Dan Ramer does!
August 11th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
I think that resolutions higher than HDTV have a place in home theater use, where you are sitting in a dedicated space in front of a very large screen that fills 30+ or 40+ degrees of your field of view and you set aside 2+ hours of your day as dedicated time to watch something.
I don’t think that resolutions higher than HDTV have any place for “television” viewing, where you are looking at a sitcom over dinner, catching some news in the morning before you leave for work, throwing in a cartoon DVD to use as opium for your kid, checking the weather forecast, etc. I think my girlfriend is a fairly representative example of the majority of the population in her vehement objection to having a six foot wide image for casual TV viewing like this. For smaller screen sizes at typical “living room viewing distances”, HDTV is way past the point of “more detailed than necessary” already.
Even for home theater set-ups, it is a rarity to have the image filling more than 30 degrees or so of your field of view, which is the point where HDTV is already meeting the limit of the eye’s resolving for a person with 20:20 vision.
My opinion is, if any high-resolution standard has a chance of superceding the NTSC as the mainstream television format, HDTV is it (if we’re lucky), and nothing after that. Higher resolution standards may carve out a niche for themselves as huge-screen home theater formats for the well to do, but nobody should get their hopes up of having movies in that format available at their local Walgreens…
August 14th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
I’m sorry.. but give me higher res over lower res any day. The day I brought home my first HDTV my jaw litterally dropped. I want more from technology, not less.