Posted By: Stuart Sweet December 31, You know what I mean… sports that you find on your local broadcast station. There are zero — precisely no — broadcasters that put out a p signal. Yeah, today your cell phone can record p, but broadcasters are still paying the bill for the transmitters and encoders they bought back in the last decade.
All HD broadcasting in the US is in either p or i. There are a handful of 8K TVs on the market, but it's going to be many years before this resolution is common. To get the most out of your 4K TV, you need 4K content. Fortunately, there's 4K content everywhere. If you have a PC, many video cards from the last few years can render games at 4K, with varying degrees of success.
We're starting to see the roll-out of ATSC 3. Just like the initial roll-out of HDTV at the turn of the century, it's going to be a while before 4K programming is common over the air.
Before "4K" became common, you'd almost never see "2K. It's 2, pixels wide, and again, no vertical resolution is specified by the DCI. But now that "4K" has gained traction as a term used to describe TVs and content, "2K" is becoming increasingly common as shorthand for the p resolution used by most smaller and older HDTVs, as well as Blu-ray.
Remember how we talked about digital cinema resolutions only specifying the horizontal resolution? Well TVs, on the other hand, have historically used the vertical to describe resolution going back to the glass tube days. So p is the vertical resolution. Nearly all HDTVs have an aspect ratio of 1. This is another source of confusion, since decades of TV discussions have talked about vertical resolutions, and then all of a sudden we're talking about "4K TVs," which refers to the horizontal resolution.
Don't blame me, it wasn't my idea. Which is why p is not "1K. That said, most people don't call p 2K; they call it p or Full HD. By the way, i is the same resolution as p , but no modern TV is i. Roughly half the number of pixels of p. It's rare to find a TV that's p anymore. This goes back to the initial HD transition at the turn of the century.
And if you're wondering why your TV doesn't say "p" on those channels, check this out. In the computer world they use an incomprehensible and shockingly un-user-friendly jumble of letters to describe resolution.
Well, not "shockingly" since these are computers. Look, I'm a computer guy, building my own PCs since the early '90s, and even I can't tell you what half these letters mean. I can understand that initially they were implemented to make things easier, but we've got so many resolutions and combinations that now they're just annoying. The rest, you can dive into and print yourself a cheat sheet from this.
Fortunately, the only time most of you will come across this letter goulash is if you're looking for a cheap data projector or a computer monitor. There are also computer monitors that have unique resolutions like 5K 5,x2, or ultra-widescreen aspect ratios with crazy resolutions like 3,x1, There are so many variations we couldn't hope to cover them all.
Someday you might have an 8K or even 10K TV , but that's a l-o-o-o-o-ng way away. Here's where I remind you that more pixels doesn't necessarily mean a better picture. As a video professional or consumer, you will want to read this article before investing in 4K. However, these two formats are in the video equipment manufacturers market, and not the consumer market.
The effect is similar to the hype for 3D — many cameras and systems came out to create 3D content before they could figure out how consumers could watch it. Before we talk about where you can view 4K, lets talk about where you can view that seemingly outdated standard — p. Not yet. Currently, less than 0. All other major broadcast networks use either p60 or i60 encoded with MPEG There is no official word about when any of the major networks will consider airing at p in the near future.
With no current announcements, that means you will be watching your TV on cable, satellite, and the air for at least 5 more years. That is a great deal of trouble for your satellite company to do what Netflix makes so easy — deliver p content. Today, no subscriber based cable channel or premium movie channel such as HBO or Showtime stream their services live to their distributors in this format because they do not have sufficient bandwidth to provide the format streaming live to their subscribers.
If you think you are paying too much for satellite or cable right now, you will have to pay even more when they convert to p or 4K. Considering the above, if you were to buy a p LCD TV today, you may not even notice the difference between p and p. Blu-Ray discs can hold up to 50 Gigabytes of content, more than enough to deliver p HD video. Of course, your TV must be able to display p. However, the Blu-Ray Disc specifications allow encoding of p24 and p30, not p It is now standard for mid to high end smartphones to have p displays or higher.
Whether or not it makes sense, 4K on smartphones is now a reality. YouTube and Vimeo have been streaming p content for years. You could even stream content in higher resolutions. Netflix also offers p HD content, and even 4K. Although Netflix and YouTube both offer viewing options in 4K on some of their content, you are watching what is often a 15Mbps video stream, less than half of the bandwidth your p Blu-Ray Player delivers. Your 4K viewing of a highly compressed video file may not be much better than p.
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