NHK Standing By Ambitions to Launch 8K Broadcasts By 2020
KINUTA, Japan -- Though most of the consumer electronics and broadcasting worlds seem fixated on 4K (see separate story above in this issue), Japanese broadcaster NHK is promoting 8K Super Hi-Vision as “creating the future of broadcasting” with “16 times the number of pixels” of ordinary HD and fully immersive 22.2 multi-channel sound. We visited NHK’s Science and Technology Research Labs Thursday on the outskirts of Tokyo for a first-hand look at NHK’s demonstrations of 8K Super Hi-Vision on its home turf.
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We saw now-familiar footage of the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics illustrating this mosaic option. In one sequence, the Queen is shown at the center of a wide-angle view of attending dignitaries, all crisply imaged and easily recognizable. Shots of a 100-meter sprint showed no noticeable motion blur, even though all the material was captured at 60 Hz.
New footage shot at an annual fireworks festival in Nagaoka, Japan, showed off Super Hi-Vision’s high dynamic range with bursts of white and colored light against a jet-black sky. Material shot during the 2013 Carnaval in Rio also demonstrated this wide color gamut. All in all, the pictures were stunning, with inescapable “wow” effect. So, too, was the 22.2 sound, especially for the explosive fireworks. The only minor technical defect was a spaced trio of faint white marks when the screen went all-black, which NHK representatives frankly admitted simply shows how native 8K projection technology is still at an early stage of development.
NHK ultimately sees two applications for 8K Super Hi-Vision -- one for theatrical display, the other for broadcasts to the home, said Masayuki Sugawara, who specializes in baseband capture as head of NHK’s Advanced Television Systems Research Division. Sugawara then showed us a split-screen demonstration of a newspaper displayed on a Sharp 85-inch LCD monitor, with half the screen in 4K and the other half in 8K. This clearly showed how even the smallest print text is readable in 8K, but fuzzy in 4K.
Sugawara then changed the source material to what looked at first to be a still picture of Tokyo taken from a tall building in the city’s Roppongi district. It was only after a few minutes that we realized that cars on the elevated highways and boats in Tokyo Bay were moving. Although the cars are tiny, they are clearly resolved. “All the material you have seen was captured at 60 Hz without compression,” Sugawara said. “Our target for capture is 120 Hz. We have already built prototype cameras and displays that can work at 120 Hz. It will take several years to deploy them but our target is 2020.”
HEVC
The demo footage was captured uncompressed, in solid state storage, with RGB data streams, each with 10-bit resolution to give a total data rate of 72 Gbps, Sugawara said. This is clearly far too much data to broadcast or for consumer applications, he said. “With HEVC, we will be able to reduce it to between 80 and 100 megabits per second,” he said. “We have already done subjective tests and believe that this will be good” for transmission to the home, he said. “But of course, it will have to be by satellite.”
As for NHK’s avowed plans to jump straight to 8K, “there are no 4K broadcasts yet but there is a consortium of Japanese broadcasters and manufacturers and it plans 4K broadcasts soon, probably by May or June,” said Tomohiro Saito, a senior research engineer in NHK’s Advanced Transmission Systems Research Division. “It will be a single satellite channel with a data rate around 20 or 30 megabits per second, using HEVC,” said Saito, who specializes in data transmissions to the home. “But there will not be many set-top boxes because production level is very low.”
That consortium is promoting 4K to the home and ultimately will promote 8K, Saito said. “Some companies think 4K is more important than 8K. It is important for CE manufacturers. But NHK is promoting 8K. The target is to start 8K trial broadcasts by 2016. But I don’t think there will be consumer sets by 2016. We hope that by 2018 there will be more broadcasts and then in 2020 there can be a regular 8K service by satellite.” That would coincide with the Summer Olympic Games planned for 2020 in Tokyo.
Bottom line, the engineers said, is that NHK regards 8K “as the most advanced two-dimensional medium” for future generations of TV, and is proud that it began R&D work on Super Hi-Vision in 1995. NHK is producing native 4K content as a means “to accumulate know-how for preparation of 8K production, but NHK views 4K as only a passing point toward 8K, they said.
The engineers were noncommittal when asked if NHK sees a future in 3D TV and if so, what kind of future? “NHK’s position so far has been that binocular stereo 3D is unsuitable for general broadcasting services,” the engineers said. “The 3D of the future will have to be viewed without special glasses and have a better fit with the human visual sense. Tangibly, that means reproducing images in 3D. The research continues.”