As someone in Silicon Valley close to the underground goings on of high tech, the couple years I've kept an eye on developments in 4k and 8k Ultra HD TV. Until last year there was little available publicly in part because consumers and broadcasters were making the change from NTSC to 1080p HDTV with TV manufacturers not wanting to discourage current sales of that golden goose. But now with 1080p mostly built out, the cat is out of the bag publicly so now some consumers are suddenly wondering why they spent mega bucks on huge 1080p sets if much better sets were soon to be available? That was followed by sober cautions that though some very expensive Ultra HD sets may soon be available, that media and content to play on them, much less broadcasted television won't be realistically available anytime soon. So for now enthusiasts are supposed to be mainly among rich home theatre users.
Before the economic meltdown I mothballed my emerging photograpic print sales business except for my website then went back to work in hi tech that has always been an easier way to make a decent living for this person. Within that process stopped accumulating large format Lightjet color prints in the sub 40 inch size that up front also required expensive drum scanning and expensive matting much less framing.
So a thought occurred to me that such larger monitor displays might be a better way for photographers to display their photography to an audience than numbers of framed and or matted prints. Not an issue for photographers with small prints but very much the situation for large format color print persons. And even 8k dimensions are well within the pixel range of higher end DSLRs so this is no longer a realm for just we LF enthusiasts. One reason the business I began a decade ago went to sleep was I realised the logistics of moving around dozens of large physical prints for any public displays or exhibitions was rather futile for a peon.
The last few months have seen several announcement of multi 4 figure buck Ultra HD sets either in development or production. And last month the first more basic model has appeared. At the same time LCD manufacturers have been able to manufacture displays such as the current Ipad's and Android tables that suddenly have pixel densities as great as the highest end printers are capable of printing at. If that doesn't turn a light bulb on in some of your noggins then it should. Obviously those marketing Ultra HD have not yet connected with the idea that those products might have special value to photographers. My own vision is that for those of us with rather extensive numbers of high quality marketable images, it will be much easier to effectively display them to either the public or commercial clients by hauling around a single monitor and pc versus a van full of heavy framed prints. The video driver and pc control interface in fact ought to be simpler than products targeted for video media so would expect lower price end products.
$1500 Ultra HD TV
http://news.consumerreports.org/elec...reat-deal.html
David Senesac
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Originally Posted by QT Luong
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