Chris Chinnock, founder and president of consultants Insight Media and organiser of last week’s QLED & Advanced Display Summit held in Hollywood, quotes one of his speakers saying that the development of 8K broadcasting is “right on track”. Chinnock was writing his summary for Display Daily.

Michael Cioni, SVP Innovation at high-end cinema camera specialists Panavision, said that not only was 8K right on track but that its adoption is essentially inevitable, and he was now thinking about 16K and even 32K.

Panavision already supplies an 8K camera – as do other camera specialists – but Cioni said that as far as professional use was concerned in film and TV production, the usual cluster of objections applied to 8K and said that most objectors to 8K in production would say they didn’t ask for it, resolution was too high, downloads were too slow, storage too expensive and that camera render times were too long.

Chinnock quotes Cioni saying: “When someone instantly rejects something, what this really means is: I didn’t ask for it: I don’t understand it; I am uncomfortable with it.”

Cioni uses his own variation of Gordon Moore’s transistor doubling theory over a typical 2-year cycle, saying that by going back to 2001 when Standard Definition resolution was mainstream, but that by 2009 4K resolution was introduced, so ‘Cioni’s Adaption’ of Moore’s Law suggested an 8-year difference, and thus 4 Moore cycles. Cioni argued at the conference that 4K was spot on in terms of a four-fold improvement in resolution (from SD to 4K) and again, three years further on between 2015 to now where 8K TVs offering 33.8 megapixels being available.

“From this analysis, Cioni concluded that 8K resolution is not too high but just another step along the path toward ever increasing resolutions,” reported Chinnock.

Cioni told delegates that the cost of data storage for 4K (and 8K) had tumbled, from about $18.40 per GB/s in 2000 to just $0.04 per GB/s last year.

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