Just after I spend a ton of money on an Internet-ready TV, here comes the next standard.
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\nIt’s called 4K. If you’ve been around computers a while, you remember when some basic models were sold with just 4K of RAM. The Vic 20, for example.<\/p>\n
4K is about 4,000 of something. Officially it’s 4,048. Not a lot, but for video resolution, it’s a lot.<\/p>\n
The present video resolution for HDTV is about 1,000 pixels across. The 4K resolution quadruples that, making the image just about as close to what you’d get in a movie theatre as you possibly can.<\/p>\n
So, obviously, anyone who wants to show up the neighbors needs to get a 4K TV immediately!<\/p>\n
The problem: They’re not really available, yet. A couple of manufacturers have them out, but that’s about it.<\/p>\n
Another problem: They’re very expensive.<\/p>\n
The best problem: There’s really nothing out there to take advantage of 4K yet. Sure, some films have been shot at that resolution, but there are no playback devices.<\/p>\n
Worse problem: The Internet speed in this country isn’t fast enough to stream a 4K movie into your home, onto your 4K Internet-ready TV. That process requires about 20mbps of bandwidth. Presently the only country that has that kind of speed is South Korea.<\/p>\n
Here in the US, the average broadband connection is about 6mbps. That’s still really fast, fast enough for regular HD streaming movies, but not fast enough yet for 4K.<\/p>\n
So this is yet another example of technology being capable of something, but the infrastructure isn’t there to support it. Yet.<\/p>\n
In about five years or so — just when my new TV is starting to break — it will be time to upgrade to 4K HDTV. Hopefully by then we’ll have some faster Internet to support those streaming movies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just after I spend a ton of money on an Internet-ready TV, here comes the next standard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3364"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3366,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3364\/revisions\/3366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}