Advanced Television

4K TV “is no gimmick” says SMPTE

April 7, 2014

By Chris Forrester

4K TV is on its way, and many of the current problems are rapidly being solved, says Pete Putman, president of Roam Consulting and a frequent participant in SMPTE organised events. In a SMPTE ‘hot button’ paper, released to coincide with the opening of NAB, he says that 4K television now represents a “meaningful substance to the industry”.

“I often speak about the 4K universe from the other side of the screen–the consumer side,” Putman said. “In the SMPTE world, we often drill down on the technical details, but don’t always pay as much attention to what is happening in the consumer world. So I like to talk about what is happening with consumer televisions–interfaces, backlighting technologies, colour technologies, and other things. But there is a lot more going on, like LCD fabrication yields, signal transport from point A to point B, video compression, HDMI and DisplayPort, SDI, all those things. It is really becoming about how you make the infrastructure work.”

“There are a half-dozen things happening at the same time, not necessarily in the same room, but they are happening coincidentally with the move to 4K, and that is why the 4K ecosystem is moving ahead.”

Putman says the industry has some “very exciting new technology innovations going on that have breathed new life into LCD technology.”

Categories: Articles, UHD, Ultra-HD/4K