June 3, 2008

NHK's HDTV Successor, Super Hi-Vision, Goes Color

Japanese public broadcaster NHK has been working on a Super Hi-Vision (SHV) technology since 2002, a technology they feel will eventually be HDTV's successor. Up until last week NHK's Super Hi-Vision tech was able to produce a television picture with a resolution roughly 16 times finer than today's 1080p standard, but only in black and white. A 33 megapixel image sensor the company recently developed in their Tokyo research lab has moved that high-res picture into the colored world. The sensor in combo with a new signal processing circuit, ultra high-resolution lens and thinner optical cable were able to display a single SHV image with a 7680x4320 pixel resolution, equal to 16 tiled HDTV screens. The sensor enable the picture's primary red, blue, and green colors to display in full resolution as standalone colors thanks to each color having a devoted chip. This enable the picture to be so bright and sharp that a viewer can read the details on a shirt tag when the camera captures the image from several meters away! No actual hardware has been developed yet, and if it was manufactured right now it would be too big to be of practical use. We'll keep an eye on this, because with NHK being an early HDTV innovator as far back as 1964 we suspect Super Hi-Vision technology will be big in the future.

Via PC World