Sony VPL-vw1000 - Page 135

And they are not that close to a standard yet. One dosen't get the feeling that there is any urgency for action. And there is debate about whether HDMI despite the coming new standard should be the 4K carrier according to industry insiders posting on AV Science.'

Sony can't afford to sit. Its survival as a hardware company may very nuch depend on the success of PS4.'
Edited by mark haflich - 2/20/13 at 10:03am

Well, if they don't, 4K will not be successful either...

The 99% will not buy 4K... Just like they are not buying 3D.

Just saying!!!

The future is on them at this point.

Since 4 layer BD burners are already being sold in some parts of the world (e.g., UK) for very little more than stardard dual layer burners, I really doubt that there would be much of a cost impact of including a 4 layer ROM drive in the PS4, especially if the PS4 doesn't go into production until the 2nd half of 2013. I agree with Mark that the Blu-ray 4K standard, assuming there will be one, it not going to be in place by the time the PS4 begins shipping, so I would certainly not expect the PS4, as it ships, to be compatible with a not yet completed standard. However, it may be possible that a subsequent firmware update could add this capabiltiy as long as the PS4 does have a compatible blu-ray drive, an 4K UHD compatible output (e.g., HDMI 2.0) and enough processing power to do HEVC (or whatever codec is selected for Blu-ray 4K) decoding in software. I believe there is a chance this could happen and perhaps when the Sony press conference is over (i.e., it starts just 6 hours from now) we will find out what Sony actually has planned.

My quess is Sony will announce the PS4 will work as a 4K UHD player on the planned Sony 4K movie download service. While it may have the potential to later be upgraded via firmware to support a 4K version of Blu-ray, I do not expect this will not be publically announced at today's press event since it's too early to know for certain if this will be possible or not.
Edited by Ron Jones - 2/20/13 at 9:19am

I for one, want them to blow me out of the water, as it is the future of our hobby. My Home Theater setup is screaming for Bright 4K Projectors!

Hobby? For me its not a hobby, its a means to and end and the end is watching contect and ofc course getting content.

A hobby is photography, chasing bootie, whatever.

But there is no end. Things are constantly improving, evolving, etc.......... You really dont consider what most of us do as far as HT a hobby? I cant think of a better example of a hobby than HT when I think about how many times I have upgraded various things, changed things, experimented, etc......... I think when you are in HT to the level that a lot of us AVSers are, the HT is never truly done but only reaches temporary plateaus which eventually become hills to climb again in order to get to that next level or upgrade. You dont agree?

You want to keep making it better. That's OK. Of course, there are many things we know we could improve if we thought it nercessary or disrable pending that we can afford it.

There are many interests that I have that I consider hobbies. This is not one of them.

It never ends. HT is a fascinating subject . My hoobies are what I watcg (some of them). Sports, entertainment or hobby or is thee a difference.

Forum. Can I make it better. Litttle inexpensive tricks, black paint, A darblet switching to FIOS. We learn to fix it or recognize when its broke and more importantly and less successfully here when it isn't,

And it isn't always better. Digital Prjectors vs CRTs/ The CRT still did somethings and some important things better. And you could coverge them without scaling.

Now its almost 6PM and the Sony Press Conferrence on PS4 starts at 6PM and You can watch it for free on your google machine.

I listened to most of the Sony event and spot checked the rest and it appears it was virtually 100% focused on what a great gaming machine the PS4 will be with presentations from several game developer companies plus an overview of the archecture of the machine, said to have a "supercharged PC architecture". I found no specific mention of video capabillities outside of the context of video games and just a mention in passing that it supports such services a netflix, amazon, etc. No mention was made of 4K Ultra HD in any context. Perhaps some future Sony press conference, such as one for the roll out of their 4K video download service, will include the PS4 in those discussions.
Edited by Ron Jones - 2/20/13 at 6:08pm

Yep. A complete waste of time re HT content delivery. Maybe Sony paid for the event by selling stage time to the game companies. It is really a misnomer to call these dog and pony shows a press conference.
Edited by mark haflich - 2/21/13 at 5:06am

i'm not sure why folks thought this was going to be the 4K magic bullet. The specs are already old news based on current PC technology.

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/130221a_e.pdf

1.84 Teraflops of GPU processing power for a unit that isn't due out for 3/4 a year. A Current PC with a Radeon 7970 will crank out 3.79 Teraflops and 264 GB/sec which is a 100 GB/sec more than the PS4 specs.

The good news is, AMD seems focused on supporting 4K

'The market isn’t ready for 4k video, but Radeon™ is. With full support for HDMI® (with 4K) and DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2, the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 is set for quad HD.'

perhaps once the standards are set, a modern PC can serve as a 4K delivery platform.

Some more detailed specs are out - PS4 has a 6x Blu Ray drive in it. No mention of any new physical media. If Sony are the most vocal company being serious about 4K then looks like we'll have to wait a while longer for content to appear

Zombie, it has nothing to do with actual Tflop performance, this was Sony's only real chance to get ultra HD drives out on the market. I unfortunately think 4K is going to take much much longer to take off now, if at all...

Sony gambled last generation in a very big way. They introduced a $600 console with a brand new technology (Blu-Ray) that they weren't 100% sure would be successful. This gamble drastically increased the price of the console and put it out of the reach of many people. The price alone is what put Sony in third place, behind Nintendo and Microsoft. They just lost too much time before prices dropped to an acceptable, mainstream level.

With no HDMI standard, no 4K Blu-Ray standard (or other 4K disc standard), and a very small number of 4K TVs in the market, they would have been foolish to introduce a new, high-priced piece of technology (even a 4-layer BD drive) that inflated the price of the console. Hell, if the rumors of a $429/$529 PS4 are true, I think they're already behind.

There's no way 4K won't take off. If a new HDMI standard is created before the end of the year, other standards and hardware will follow suit. And before then (hopefully this summer) we'll have digital distribution of 4K content (Sony, RED, etc.).

I think Sony made the absolute right decision from a business standpoint. They make a lot more money from their Playstation brand than they do their TV division.

It seems both nVidia and AMD are focused on it. My nVidia GTX 670 supports 4K as well. I really love this graphics card. I've had it for almost a year now.

I also have a 4k ready gaming PC

Wait till I have a 3-way 780 Titan machine... Lol. PS4? More like PS6!!!

I've been thinking of going SLI recently. Though I may do a complete overhaul of my system as I'm still rocking out an LGA 1366 motherboard and an i7 920 @ 3.6ghz. Lately I've been thinking that certain games need the extra oomph for my 30" monitor. Not sure if it's just a cpu upgrade I need or if it's really my GPU that's not powerful enough. I want to max games out at 2650 x 1600 and get a decent 30fps+ at all times on every game I play.

I was drooling seeing your 2.35 gaming setup SOWK and would love to be able to do the same on my scope screen. HTPC might be my next adventure.

If that goes anything like the mess was trying to use a decent HTPC as a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player, I'll pass.

The mistake here is jumping the gun for questionable market share gain. If the new machines from Microsoft and Sony aren't even going to match current high-end PC specs, they should have waited before pushing the next gen. Originally PS3 was quoted as being a 10 year console. That's the timetable they should have stuck to (at least 8-9 years). Part of me hopes the new Microsoft and Sony consoles get the type of reception that the Wii U got. There is no compelling reason to be doing next gen at this point when most people's equipment is pushed to its limits (720p and 1080p) by what they have now.

When you say "jumping the gun," you've got to remember that these consoles are in development for 4-5 years. It's not like they can, months before release, just completely change everything. Both Sony and Microsoft were virtually locked in for the last year or so. It was just a matter of announcement schedule.

The PS3 is showing its age, and is rapidly ceding market share to the PC (as is the Xbox). A 10-year console cycle just isn't realistic-- that's something I said when they first made the comment. I think saying something like that shows a disconnect between the customer and the product, and the product and the current state of technology. I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 and Xbox 720 go back to the 5-year console cycle.

The vast, vast majority of current console games run in 720p and lower resolution (Halo and COD, for example, run at a resolution that's more in the range of 560p.) Very, very, very few console games run at 1080p, and the ones that do are typically XBLA and PSN games, not AAA titles. A move to new generation will bump virtually all games up to 1080p and give some reliable framerates. I'd say that's a great benefit.

So we are back to servers now for mainstream 4K playback, like the prototype behind glass server Sony showed at CES and which they way will be out with some means of getting content to it by the end of summer and the Red Redray server and the Odemax delivery system (as to the delivery system, i wouldn't hold my breadth, odemax appears to be a not well thought out twinkle in someones eye. But I hope I'm wrong.

Hmmm...I don't know about this. The benefits of 1080i/p over 720p for the typical users' (not AVS members) viewing environments are questionable, at best, and going from 1080p to 4K for the vast majority of folks will be practically unnoticeable. However, despite their questionable advantage for J6P, true 1080p panels weren't priced into the stratosphere when they became available as viable options to 720p panels so the transition to 1080p was relatively seamless. And content delivery systems (BD and HD DVD) were already in place to support 1080p.

Unfortunately, If 3D can't take off despite the fact that most entry level flat panels and BD players already support it, I think 4K has significant hurdles. Supporting it requires new content sources, new display devices, and new standards, none of which will be cheap in the near- to mid-term. Plus, it'll require end users to replace virtually all of their existing equipment in exchange for a picture that's indistinguishable from 1080p on all but the largest, most high-quality displays. On top of this, the market seems to be moving toward lower-quality streamed sources vs high quality optical-based sources, and the infrastructure isn't there to support BD-quality streaming, much less 4K.

I think it'll be several years, if ever, before 4K becomes the norm.

Off course it will take years. Something like five years to have significant penetration. It will be buzz word re advertise speak within 3 years but it will take a lot longer to reach where 1080p is today.

but you must not ythink and rationilize incorrectltly about 4K by just looking at a resolution increase. Even Sony knows that because if it were just a resolution increase it will fail iun the mass market. No. No. No. My friend. It will offer much improved picture quality through such things as longer bit length and much wide color spaces. And there is more.

But alas it will take quite a bit of time with many unknowns at this point.

the closest thing we have to a plan is ITU 2020 and that needs some fixing too.

I remember building an 'HD ready' PC back in 2000 using a Sony 24" GDM-FW900, I had to wait another 6 years before I had anything to play on it.

The whole 10 year life cycle is BS on Sony's part, the PS2 was released in 2000 and the PS3 was released in 2006. Yeah, I am sure some people were still buying a few PS2s in 2010 but calling it part of the lifecycle is misleading. And if we are talking in generations across manufacturers then the Xbox 360 was released in 2005 meaning that we never really got away from a 5 year cycle for consoles.

I thought this short article was interesting. Apparently, the PS4 will output 4K for "video recorded in the format." I'm guessing that includes the UI as well. Of course, games can't be output at that resolution.

Perhaps we will see a video download service down the road after all.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/02/21/ps4-will-output-video-in-4k-but-not-games/

Why wouldn't they be able to be output games at that resolution? Scaling doesn't take a lot of power to do. Games will probably be rendered at a lower resolution and scaled to 4K before it leaves the console. This is exactly what the PS3/360 does when you output at 1080p. The only caveat at this point is outputting the games at something higher than 24hz. They did wonders with the HDMI chip in the old PS3s. They softmodded the crap out of it to do a plethora of things it didn't initially support. So I'm betting they can tweak the hell out of this one too if need be.

Why waste the processing power to scale to 4K and worry about "tweaking" the HDMI 1.4 output if it's not going to do anything for graphical quality?

I'm more than happy accepting a true 1080p signal that runs at a smooth clip over sacrificing frame rate for upscaling that doesn't really do anything.

If the PS4 can upscale more cleanly than the display can do it I'd definitely lose a couple unnoticable fps here and there. If you want high frame rates and games to be rendered at native resolutions you shouldn't be buying a console.

I actually think it's just the opposite. Consoles need every frame they can get, regardless of scaling resolution. Look at most modern console first persons shooters-- they sacrifice resolution to get as many frames as possible, which is important when playing competitively.

And why would they throw effort behind "tweaking" the existing HDMI standard (if something like that would even be possible?) Sony's definitely making the right call on this one.

I'm not talking about them tweaking the standard, I'm talking about the HDMI chip inside the console. The PS3 has a HDMI 1.3 port and can do 3D and output 4K photos. They softmodded the chip to allow for such things. There should be more than enough juice to output 1080p native rendered games at 60fps.

Considering there isn't a 4K standard or HDMI standard for this next gen format they will almost certainly need to softmod the HDMI port in the PS4 to comply to those standards.

PS4 with video download and video/data on disk option loaded into the resident HD prior to play could be a transitional path to a full download model internationally........down the track when capabilities and required speed exist.

I think the PS4 has a few more tricks up it's sleeve than is being publicised currently. Sony would have a few different modular boards in the lab awaiting final decision making as to the final HW configuration/capabilities.