| Saturday, February 23, 2008 |
11:27 - Picture quality like I've never ciné
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13512_1-9875003-23.html
|
(top) |
Peter Glaskowsky speculates on the future of the home video landscape, and what the next format war will entail:
The basic parameters are easy to predict. As I described last August in "After HD, what's next?" the heir apparent to HDTV is what's called "4K"-- that is, a display resolution with about 4,096 horizontal pixels and 2,160 scan lines. Sony already makes projectors that support this resolution. Red Digital Cinema makes 4K cameras. Director Peter Jackson has made a short film in 4K, and the "Final Cut" of Blade Runner was remastered in 4K.
So 4K is coming, and it isn't far away.
But why should there be a format war?
Well, there's always a format war. There was even a DVD format war, although we're all fortunate that it was resolved well before discs or players hit the market.
Sony will want to lead the transition to 4K, but the DVD Forum will still be around in five years. That's a recipe for a format war right there.
Some of the commenters are rightly pointing out that 4K won't be a going concern for most consumers, even despite our knowing eyebrow-waggles about claims in the 80s of 640K being sufficient for anybody's needs:
The two vehicles of video signals leapfrog eachother. First, TV had better quality than VHS. Then DVD came out, and had better quality than the TV. Then HD TV transmissions began in 720p, which is an improvement over DVD. Then discs struck back with 1080p Bluray. So, my prediction is that the next increase in picture quality and resolution will come after TV stations can transmit in greater than 1920x1080p. This isn't really on the horizon yet.
Besides, even if we discerning technophiles can materially distinguish between a 480p DVD and a 720p HTDV broadcast and a 1080p Blu-Ray movie, we have to bear in mind that the market has a tendency to do its own thing in gleeful spite of what the chin-stroking set has to say about it. And the market has shown that it's pretty much happy with DVDs' resolution—or, indeed, the resolution they can get from a transcoded DivX video online. We're only just now getting comfortable en masse with paying extra for an HD version of a movie over a regular definition version—and that's only to the tune of a dollar more when we're renting, the same premium as we'd pay for a new release over a library title. Just as DVDs had to be eased into the market with only marginally higher prices than VHS versions, HD movies aren't enough of an obvious win over SD movies as to warrant any higher price differential—despite how much more gorgeous they might look in a parallel-screen comparison. That should tell us something about just how quickly we ought to expect the general movie-watching public to start demanding 4K resolution.
For my part, most of the speculation I've been hearing here and there is that the next format war won't be over physical media at all, but which of the digital "cloud" media architectures will win. Xbox 360? Apple TV? TiVo? Netflix on-demand? Cable TV on-demand? BitTorrent?
I'm not prepared to back any horses in that race (I'm going to go with Apple TV just because I'm a raving partisan and think it's cool), but I'm increasingly of the opinion that owning physical media is less and less important. There are a handful of movies that I want to have "special edition" DVD sets of (and will buy the same thing when it shows up on Blu-Ray), but for the bulk of the world of movies, I don't need ownership at all. Renting is fine. I only need to see a given movie once every few years, as opposed to music which I can leave in a daily rotation and not pay much attention to it. And when renting is the model, a broadband download seems like a perfect solution for my needs, especially if it only costs a fraction of the full purchase price and takes up zero space on my shelf.
I'm just about to throw away an entire shelf of MST3K tapes and not replace them with anything. Why? Not because I don't want to see a given bit of robo-riffage again—but because I know that if I ever do, it won't be that hard to find, for at most three or four bucks. (Even if it's one of the un-officially-released ones.) And when I'm done watching it, I won't want it to sit on my shelf collecting dust until the next time the itch to see it strikes me.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
