Akihabara News: 4K or Quad Full HD. The next gen­er­a­tion in pix­els. The pixel for­mat: 3840 x 2160. That’s hav­ing four 1920 x 1080 in a 2×2 matrix. JVC has announced its 4K pro­to­type cam­corder. 3840 x 2160 = 8.29 megapix­els. And that’s just a sin­gle frame. At 60fps the band­width is incred­i­ble: 1.42 giga­bytes per second!*

I don’t know what type of image sen­sors JVC is using but I’m guess­ing they will be get­ting quite hot pump­ing that much data into a stor­age medium. A 60 minute 4K footage would require a bit over 5 ter­abytes. I guess Seagate is happy that stor­age needs in the future will only increase. Exponentially.

The 4K or Quad Full HD con­tent prob­lem is now partly solved: we can at least expect some pro­fes­sion­als to start cap­tur­ing video in this for­mat. For 4K to really get going the indus­try needs to get this in the hands of the early adopters. How about a Canon 1Ds Mark Mark IV with 4K video cap­ture capa­bil­ity? Just dreaming…

If you want to future proof your LCD TV invest­ment for the long term, and you need to make that deci­sion right now, there is really one thing do: get Westinghouse Digital’s D56QX1, a 56″ Quad Full HD mon­i­tor. You can also choose from a Toshiba or an Eizo. (I’m not sure if the Toshiba is avail­able com­mer­cially.) Just when you thought 1080p was it.

* Here’s the math: Each pixel has 3 sub-pixels at a min­i­mum of 8 bits. So each pixel is 24bits. 8.29 megapix­els  x 60/second x 24bits/pixel. 1 kilo­byte = 1024 bytes.