I'd also like to see more displays offering the proper 9:27 aspect ratio which is used by the vast majority of
cinema films. There is one such model already available, but the last time I saw a price it was $24K. Seems to
me if the industry tries to churn out very large displays at 4K but sticks with the normal 9:16 ratio, they will
miss the movie equivalent of the hifi market, just as the hifi buffs shunned CDs when they first came out
due to the choice of 16bit (that was enough to satisfy 95% of listeners, but the 5% were those with real
money to burn, the ones who wanted quality, which need 24bit or more).
As someone said earlier, large displays just using 1080p do not look that good. I was in a shop today,
an LED 47" LG was showing Spiderman in HD; the pixelation was obvious. If anything, the latest plasma
tech seems better at masking this effect.
Btw, a guy I know at a movie company told me back in April that they'd just received a job involving 12 streams
requiring 50+ layers of 8K per stream. In order to handle the load, all the HP Z800 Flame setups were upgraded to
96GB RAM. To cope with the I/O, such places are adopting 12Gbit SAS and 16Gbit FibreChannel, while Emulex
have already demo'd a 32Gbit HBA, ie. each port is more than 5X faster than 6Gbit SATA; at 3.2GB/sec per port,
only 4 ports are needed to guarantee UHDTV 8K playback from a single system. The company's SAN can move
15GB/sec, but it will be upgraded aswell over time.
Some notes on 2K btw: the term '2K' in the industry doesn't mean anything specific. It can mean either 2048x1556,
2048x1536, 2048x3072, 1828x1556, 1828x1332 and at least six additional modes. The confusion stems from legacy
issues related to Kodak's original Cineon system back in 1992; these modes merely represented the quarter resolutions
of various 16mm / 35mm / 65mm film formats.
Likewise, the difference between HD and 2K is a muddled issue too since there are a multitude of both frame and field
rates (over a dozen for each format), although the most widely used atm are 50Hz and 59.94Hz interlaced.
Ian.