I was a little surprised to see Michael Reichmann's Ode to 4K last week. Yes, 4K is certainly here in Hollywood, and thus is trickling down into the ad agencies and high-end videographer ranks as they try to keep up and bulletproof themselves from any future format change. But 4K has some huge stumbling blocks before it becomes prevalent, and one of those stumbling blocks is a killer.
It's not like we haven't gone through this before. We did, with HD TV. And before that, digital capture. And before that, color TV. The debate over formats and standardizations for HD TV took over a decade, was highly contentious, and the rollout to the point where a majority of customers had it took almost as long (at least here in the US; but the US is a critical market for high tech still, so real solutions tend to have to reflect our regulatory and other issues).
Some of you reading this are asking "what is 4K"? It's a loose term for a jumble of video formats. We have several 4K definitions in place at the moment, mostly via Hollywood, which is pushing digital projectors on theaters. In a simplistic sense, HD TV tops out at 1920 x 1080 pixels. 4K tops out at 4096 x 3112 pixels. Yeah, that's a 4:3 aspect ratio, and aspect ratios are one of the things we fought about with HD TV for years; in 16:9 aspect ratio 4K is usually, but not always, defined as 4096 x 2160. But Hollywood likes to frame wider than 16:9. No matter what the actual pixel count, the basic definition of 4K is something akin to this: four times the pixels of HD TV and a doubling of resolution.
Let's tackle some of the 4K stumbling points.
Price: Michael seems to think this is the roadblock, but it is not. While current prices are in the five figure category for a big screen 4K monitor, the only thing that holds it there is volume. Ultimately, a 4K panel should be about as cheap to produce as 2K panel, but it takes volume to get to that point. It's the other stumbling blocks that keep volume from increasing to the point where 4K is affordable to consumers. The TV makers won't be the stumbling block, as they'll be happy to produce 4K sets at somewhat higher than 1080P prices--it would restore their product margins. Indeed, this is part of the problem with 4K, just as it was with HD TV: it's being driven from the wrong end. It isn't consumers that are clammoring for it, it's manufacturers looking for a way to get away from the price wars that have made HD TV mostly unprofitable for most of them.
Standards: Hollywood has defined 4K. So has NHK in Japan, and they'll be demonstrating it in Japan for this year's Olympics. Both of the main standards bodies involved in International TV are discussing 4K. There are still a lot of conflicting bits (literally) in the definitions being used, including compression (more on that in a bit). Patents also come into play, as we've got multiple players holding key patents with everyone wanting a piece of any future patent pool. We'll need that patent pool merge (or at least an extension of the MPEG LA pool) to agree on a standard, is my guess.
Visual: A 4K video camera running at 60 fps (one of the current definitions) is likely going to have a faster than 1/60 minimum shutter speed. Hollywood 4K videographers seem to want 60 fps. I'm not sure why, as it moves them a long way from the traditional Hollywood look, where intraframe blur is actually part of the visual style (24 fps film cameras generated 1/50 minimum shutter speeds). Maybe a new visual style will be welcome, and of course we can always post process intraframe blur in ;~). Still, it's a change no one is in agreement on (there's a move afoot from some for even higher frame rates).
Delivery: Here's the killer problem. We can't deliver 4K video to consumers. Heck, we're still having big trouble delivering 1080P/30 to consumers. We need bigger, faster pipes. True, some countries involved in TV production (Japan, Korea) have fast and ubiquitous Internet access, and this is a danger for 4K: a standard is evolving that can't currently be delivered at the consumer level in most countries, even the US and Europe. Here in the US we can't really deliver highly compressed 1080P reliably, let alone to everyone. So we also need a well-defined and widely available physical format to distribute content with (oh dear, here we go with the DVD HD versus Blu-Ray wars again). We also need to settle on a compression to deliver content with, too, as we certainly have no chance to deliver uncompressed 4K content any time soon. Delivery is a classic Chicken versus Egg problem. 3D has been going through this: we can deliver fancy 3D TVs at regular TV prices, but we don't have enough content to justify really having to buy one. This is 4K's basic problem: until delivery of content is assured, it isn't a consumer format.
Theaters: Your local theater isn't going to like investing in 4K projection equipment if you can do the same thing at home at consumer prices. Hollywood has a vested interest in 4K digital projection, but not in consumers' hands. This is one of the things I hate about tech: we get deep pocket organizations that are resistent to change because they believe it removes their advantage and they won't be able to market against it. We've watched the music, video, and publishing industries all try to stall tech advances because they were afraid of them. That resistance hasn't gotten lower over time. Hollywood still wants to distribute first to theaters, second to premium pay-to-view, third to physical media, and finally to streaming. They want each progression of distribution to be done via a time delay, and in lower quality. Yes, I strongly believe there's a potential business model to flip that and prove them wrong. But my point here is that these are the deep pockets that 4K as a potential consumer format is fighting today.
The funny thing is that the one impediment to 4K is not equipment (the thing that prompted Michael to write about 4K was the appearance of US$5000 4K video camera). We have 4K cameras. We can capture and edit 4K content with many of our current tools. We can show 4K content (albeit mostly at theatres that have the right equipment). More 4K equipment is being produced every day and will continue to be. This is no different than any other "revolution" in video over the past 50 years. I first saw 1080P in 1975, for instance. I could have bought a very expensive camera, editor, and display to work with it, had I wanted to. A few did, but what we got as the actual standard in the late 90's was different than those original models could work with ;~).
I have no doubt we will have 4K in our future. The questions are when will it impact you directly, and when will it become a widespread consumer format. If you're a high end professional videographer, you already need it (and preferably a large sensor version of it that records raw, such as that which the RED produces). It's the same problem as still photographers have: high-end clients demand over sampling and highest possible quality. If you're creating stills for big agencies these days, 24mp is a bare minimum. Most of them want medium format levels of pixels (30mp or more). The same thing is happening in video. They want 1080P/60 uncompressed at a minimum, but would really prefer 4K. Why? Because it "future safes" them. If they have to pull up something they used in a previous campaign it'll be in a high enough resolution that it can still be used with that future technology.
So you may ask why I'm writing about 4K on a predominately still photography site. Whether you want them to be or not, stills and video are now interlinked. Sensor work now is done trying to accomodate both. I was curious as to whether Nikon would get to 4K on the D4. They didn't. As a matter of fact, they didn't get to AVCHD 2 (1080P/60). But it's clear that they'll probably have to get to 4K with a D5. To put that in clearer terms, the big issue that would be happening at the sensor and in the digital circuitry is an attempt to expand the internal bandwidth to handle four to eight times the data it currently is. There are potential pluses for still work from that (look at the 60 fps still mode on the Nikon 1).
Let's hope that the camera makers don't forget that more of us buy cameras for stills than for video.