Lookout! Here Comes UHDTV!

You know.. Just when you thought High Definition TV is the one and only and here to stay, watch out, here comes Ultra High Definition TV. To put things in perspective, lets take a Standard Definition TV or SDTV. A HDTV is about the size of 4 SDTV. Big enough? Now, take a look at this. UHDTV is the size of 16, yes, 16! HDTV put together. That's about 64 SDTV put together! And it's not very high lah hor, only about 10m high and 30m wide. LOL. Recently in Singapore, we had the Communiasia 2008, where a demonstration of a UHDTV by NHK was held. The TV screen was an unearthly, unheard off, oh my G.., 300 inch wide! Try getting a TV of that size to fit into your living room. You'd probably need to remove the first floor ceiling juz to fit it comfortably. And don't forget that you need to sit at least 15m away from the screen to view the whole screen. Wow, how big your living room had to be.. Oh yeah, price.. Don't you ever wonder how much it cost? Well, if a 52in Full HD TV could cost $10000, surely a 300in tv would cost a few hundred thousand right? Well, obviously it's wrong, we're talking Ultra HD here. That 300in giant of a TV costs $3m. Surprise surprise. LOL. But don't worry about saving up for these giant babies. The first UHDTV set will be commercially available after 2020. Long way to go! =P

Anyway, technology moves so fast this days that computer scientists are pushing themselves so fricking hard. A generation of hardware has hardly settled down in the market before the next is unveiled. As in this case, HDTV is just getting mainstream and UHDTV is already on the way. Things that are once science fiction is becoming reality. Isn't it scary? Just 2 decades ago, a Megabyte (MB) was considered a lot of storage space. Within 10 years, 1MB is hardly enough to store anything and a Gigabyte (GB) is considered a lot of space. Now within another 10 years, 1GB is easily used up and the next is Terabyte (TB) or 1000GB. Soon, the next gen of storage will come and it will be Petabyte or 1000TB or 1 000 000 GB. Furthermore, we had floppy disks (<1mb),>diskettes (1.44MB), CD-R (700MB), DVD(4.2GB), DL-DVD(8.3GB), HD-DVD(15GB), Blu-Ray (25GB) and next is Holographic Versatile Disc, HVD (3.9TB), which uses green laser. Amazing. What a fast paced world we live in! =)

Something to read on:
- Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV)
- Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD)