Super High Definition - More Resolution, and Over the Net
By Howard Wolinsky - November 12, 2007
Chicago Sun-Times
hwolinsky@suntimes.com

That high-definition TV set you’re enjoying or are planning to buy might soon be obsolete.

In a supercomputing conference today in Reno, Nev., researchers from Northwestern University and Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, will unveil a super-high-definition television set that will display images with four times the resolution possible with today’s HD sets and 25 times higher res than with DVD displays. And it will do it over the Internet, where video now is often pitiful at small sizes and even grainier in bigger sizes.

Joe Mambretti, director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research, who develops advanced technology at Northwestern University’s downtown campus, said, “The Internet today is still mainly for text and graphics. People have seen some video, and are disappointed with what they’re seeing. The Internet in the future will be better, and be much more interactive with full screen, full color and full motion.”

The technology is known as 4K, after the 4,000 horizontal pixels of display. Mambretti said Tom DeFanti, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago and also the University of California at San Diego, led the way with 4K.