4K's Future

by Patrick Hope, Marketing and Communications for iX Cameras 

I work for a high-speed camera manufacturer and as somebody constantly chasing increased resolution and frame-rate, I have a great deal of strong thoughts on the subject of 4K.

Is it worth all of the hype - yes - wait no. Actually - yes, it is a great progression forward, the increased clarity and resolution allows for increased depth and zoom potential, but it isn't a crazy significant leap like 1080p was to 4CIF; the images look much better but not worlds apart. I think we start to see 5k down-sampling happen where we pull 5K uncompressed footage and auto stabilize it, cutting jagged edges off of it and preserving the aspect ratio but removing jitters. Video motion companies already offer packages for downgrading 4K into steady 1080p. So your questions instantly run overboard into 6K and 8K and their adoption, and should we even bother adopting 4K or just right onwards. You are skipping a lot of steps in here and are jumping the gun.

The problem with 4K currently is widespread adoption. Very few people own 4K devices - TV's, even monitors so the need to push out 4K content in currently low. Very few people are doing it currently. Once the devices come, more content will come and things will start to snowball. The issue that you are missing at this point is framerate. We will see a widespread adoption of standard 60fps before we move beyond 4K. 4K will stick for a while & there will be a frame-rate push. Games like GTA V are already pushing content across multiple monitors into 60fps.

Before a jump to 8K happens I bet money that we pull through widespread adoption of 120Hz devices and European devices start to push up beyond the 50Hz limit they have.

image courtesy of vendio.com