The rapid rise of 4k TV and the HD platform has given consumers a new range of choices but often the difference between the standards is blurred.
The world of 4K and Ultra HD has caused TV makers, broadcasters, and tech sites to liberally interchange them, but they didn’t start as the same technology platform and technically they remain distinct.
From the consumer standpoint, indications would suggest that 4K is sticking around while UHD may be usurped .In basic terms 4K means more pixels than HD. A full HD 1080p image is 1080 rows high and 1920 columns wide while a 4K image approximately doubles both those numbers, yielding approximately 4 times as many pixels total.
4K is branded as such because the images are around 4,000 pixels wide. The higher the pixels, the more information that can be contained in the image. Also 4K is a professional production and cinema standard, while UHD is a consumer display and broadcast standard. The term “4K” originally stems from the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a consortium of motion picture studios that standardized a spec for the production and digital projection of 4K content. Specifically, 4K is 4,096 by 2,160, and is exactly four times the previous standard for digital editing and projection which was 2K.
The 4K standard is not just about resolution, it also defines how 4K content is encoded. A DCI 4K stream is compressed using JPEG2000, can have a bitrate of up to 250Mbps, and employs 12-bit 4:4:4 color depth.
The shift affects not just the world of 4K TV and cinema, but also cameras and image capture, smartphones and tablets, computer monitors and PC games.
Meanwhile, Ultra High Definition, or UHD for short, is the next step up from what’s called full HD, the official name for the display resolution of 1,920 by 1,080. UHD quadruples that resolution to 3,840 by 2,160. It’s not the same as 4K resolution and yet almost every TV or monitor currently on the market advertised as 4K is actually UHD.
The difference in experience is essentially that 4K display reveals far more nuance and detail.
Looking to the future evolution of the standard, 8K is coming as the next resolution standard up from 4K. Essentially it doubles the pixel height and width to yield approximately 32 million pixels.
According to a new report from IHS, the 4K display market reached US$9.2 billion last year. 4K LCD TV contributed $8.8 billion to overall revenue; however, this year 4K displays are coming to all major applications and will boost 4K revenue 94 percent year over year, reaching $18 billion by the end of 2015.
With the evolution of new display process technologies, to enhance the 4K display yield rate and lower costs, IHS forecasts that the 4K display market will be reach $52 billion in 2020.
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