Taken with something of a sense of irony, a camera phone can't do justice to the magnificence of an 8K, 33 megapixel video screen.
Tucked away in the "Future Zone", a kind of dead-end appendix in the labyrinthine RAI exhibition complex, it hardly seemed fitting for what will very likely be the future of television.
I took a picture on my phone, complete with poor focus and colour-balance issues, more in irony than in any expectation that you could see even a fraction of the detail on this incredible screen. (Note that this is heavily cropped. It's probably showing less than 50% of the actual screen area).
Essentially, 8K video makes today's best HD broadcasts look like Baird's 240-line system from the 1930s. HD is around 2.5 Megapixels. 8K is 33 Megapixels.
NHK’s Science and Research Laboratories can hardly be accused (no pun intended) of a lack of vision. The specification of the SHV (Super Hi Vision) format looks more like the resolution of a top-end digital still camera than a moving image format: SHV’s 12-bit, 8k x 4k moving images generate 90 GBytes/sec, which compresses to a mere 350 bit/sec for transmission. It takes 16 HD SDI cables to get a signal into this leviathan.
Not only are the images incredibly sharp, but they are meant to be seen on very large screens, which means that ultra high-quality lenses will be needed to bring out the full potential of the system.
So, how do you watch SHV?
Until very recently, with great difficulty. You’d need to cobble-together several conventional screens to form a tiled matrix. But recently, Sharp unveiled their first true SHV display with an astonishing 7680x4320 crammed into an 85” screen; probably the smallest sensible size for this resolution of video.
All of which begs a very big question: Is SHV going to be the saviour of 3D or will the overwhelming sense of realism simply make it completely unnecessary?