ASK THE EXPERT
“I don’t see 8K being a mass-market product,” said Paul Gray, Director of Research and Analysis at IHS Markit, as we quizzed him over coee at the IFA Global Press Conference where Sharp had just launched its 8K television (see opposite). “And the reason is that there isn’t a compelling reason in terms of content. Our forecast is for 5.4 million 8K sets shipped in 2022 [see graph], and with the vast majority going to China... Chinese panel makers making 65-inch to hit a pricepoint in China for numbers marketing. That’s a completely dierent business to selling true 8K products to receive BS [Broadcast Satellite) digital in Japan. Sound+ Image: You mean they’ ll have basic 65- inch 8 K panel sin China which might not have 10- bit processing or H DR… Paul Gray: Right, because whatever happens will not have to receive broadcast and decode it to a certain specification. Whereas NHK [in Japan] will broadcast from 1 December either six or eight hours of original 8K content a day — they’ve been building up a library over four years, so this is a genuine 8K channel, not demo loops. Sound+Image: 65-inchpanelsare a surprise, when 8 K is seen as being eective only on bigger screens? Paul Gray: I don’t think it makes much sense as a viewing proposition — but if there’s nothing to view anyway in China, then it’s more ‘look I’ve got more pixels’. Sound+ Image: And better for Chinese character delivery? Paul Gray: That’s an interesting one, character readability, because yes, if you do an well-executed design. But the question is will they be well executed? Or maybe it’s like the early 4K sets which had a 4K input, a 1080p video pipe then a 4K output, so you squeezed it through this little pipe and lost information on the way. But as nobody was watching 4K, there was no content in China anyway, it didn’t matter. Sound+ Image: And we note that the Sharp 8 K TV uses bundles of HD MI to get the signal through be ca us eH D MI can’ t yet do 8 K. Paul Gray: Until HDMI 2.1 comes out... I believe first silicon is in September. So Sharp are oering a set-top box in Japan, as I understand it, that will have the BS digital receiver in it, for which the spec is still not finalised, and an HDMI 2.1 socket — and as you say you’ve got four at the moment that will take it into the back of the set. This is a brave early product, and early products are always compromised in terms of a lot of those things because the final mature components are not available. Paul Gray: Because nobody does consumer devices that don’t have HDMI on them. You could do things like DisplayPort and other solutions, but HDMI is the de facto standard and remains. The problem is that even HDMI 2.1 is only 8K at up to 60Hz, and the broadcasters are determined to do 8K at 120Hz at some stage. Broadcasters see it that if you increase the resolution in space, then you also have to increase the resolution in time, because otherwise you throw away a lot of that increased resolution in terms of blur over the image sensor, and I think that makes a lot of sense. So for 8K we should go up again, to 100 and 120Hz. And it’s not that much extra data, actually — the tests I’ve seen from the European Broadcasting Union indicate that if you double the frame rate the data only goes up by about 10%. Because most of it is repeated — there’s not that much dierence between frames, and the more o§en you do the frames the less the dierence is, so the payload is not as big as you think. Uncompressed data, of course — connecting a chip to a panel, that’s ferocious. Sound+ Image: How about issues for those making 8 K—the cameras, the broadcasters? Paul Gray: So one of the interesting issues is lens cost. If you talk to broadcasters they say yes, there is a problem with 8K — lens availability and the basic physics of lenses. 8K lenses may not be physically possible on their own. So you have to add other things to solve these problems. For example if you think about a digital SLR, the lens has lots of distortion that is actually corrected in processing at the back of the camera, and broadcasters believe they’ll need to do something like that with 8K lenses — do your best eort with the lens and then there’s a computational processing layer to fix that lens. But certainly lenses will be very expensive. At the moment in 4K for live sports in a big stadium, you know what a conventional broadcast lens looks like, well, a 4K one costs you upwards of $300,000 — and you have eight probably. So these things don’t scale, more resolution is more demanding on the lens, shooting in bad light becomes problematic, they’re cumbersome. And I think a million-dollar lens is not impossible.
Interview:JezFord. IHSMarkit:www.ihsmarkit.com