Mega-res telly demand to boom, say ball-gazers
Ultra HD TV demand will start slow... then explode
CES 2013 If the world’s television makers are eager enough to try to convince World+Dog to buy a 4K x 2K TV, the world’s market watchers are no less keen to suggest the proponents of Ultra HD will be successful in the near future, with sales rocketing five years from now.
This week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas will undoubtedly see all the major TV manufacturers set out their Ultra HD wares, and DisplaySearch and Strategy Analytics (SA) have chipped in with predictions detailing how those sets will sell over the coming years.
SA cautiously reckons Ultra HD TV shipments - both LCD and OLED - will pass the million mark in 2015, while DisplaySearch bullishly expects that milestone to be beaten - and then some - the year before. DisplaySearch reckons more than two million LCD UHDTVs will ship in 2014, rising to 4.7 million in 2015 and on to just over seven million the year after. If OLED technology quickly goes 4K x 2K, the total number of UHDTVs shipping that year could be more than 14 million.
SA extends its forecast further: shipments will pass 50 million by 2020 when more than 130 million households worldwide - but mostly in the US, Western Europe, Japan and China - will own a UHDTV, up from ten million in 2016.
The slow start comes from the high, “more or less unaffordable” price of UHDTVs, notes SA. The explosion in shipments will follow, naturally enough, when prices plunge below $2,000 (£1,230) as manufacturers begin to pump out more and more sets through the coming five years.
Content will come more slowly, and may not come via broadband for some time yet, the researcher suggests. More pixels mean more data needs to be shifted per second, but don’t underestimate the ability of codec writers to devise even more efficient ways of squeezing much larger images through barely wider pipes.
Of course, UHD will remain a minority interest for a good few years yet. World TV shipments are widely expected to have totalled 205-210 million units in 2012, and DisplaySearch reckons they will rise to more than 260 million by 2016. If this and its other predictions prove accurate, that means no more than 5.4 per cent of the TVs that ship globally in 2016 will be 4K x 2K capable.
SA says the UHDTV market will be dominated by “jumbo-sized displays” of 60-100 inches or more: 80-inch and over displays will account for 26 per cent of global sales in 2020, and 60- to 79-inch displays will account for 61 per cent. ®
COMMENTS
are these...
the same people who told us all how the world + dog was gonna bust a nut to have 3D tv last year?
because if so, i suspect they're more of an advertising firm than market analysts
Re: Nah
I'd imagine the next gen of 4k screens will come with a decent computer on the back to allow them to be 'connected'.
I've always thought Sony have been missing a trick by not lumping a PS3 into their high end TVs. Not only would it drive BR or Game sales, it would also bring people to their online shop, and as an added bonus would make all the on screen graphics damn pretty. (Instead of all the graphics that appear to be from the 16bit era like all TV makers seem to have.) Also there must be masses of duplication with a PS3+Play chucked into a TV, so the savings on the package would be pretty good too.
Re: You will have to wait...
Well trolled, so I will bite my little bridge dweller.
As Samsung have been making UDTV's for a few years now, it shows that you believe Apple marketing machine, in that they invent everything and everyone copies.
while 79inch 4kx2k screen would be nice if you wanted to view it from across the street...
i would be more interested if they made 42inch screen have a higher DPI for a sharper image tbh...
Time would be better spent improving gamma and dynamic range.
Extra resolution is a highly desirable goal but a better priority would be to spend time improving both the gamma and dynamic range of both image sensors and displays.
1. Image sensors need to have a much better dynamic range than the current practical limit of about 10 stops before white clipping occurs. This would allow the camera electronics to properly simulate the Hurter–Driffield slanted-S (log exposure) curve of film (thus allowing detail to be extracted from the 'toe' [low light] and the 'shoulder' [highlights] of the image--still a major problem for electronic image sensors (television systems). At least 13 or 14 stops dynamic range should be the short-term target for digital image sensors so we can enter the High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) era.
2. Large hi-res extended dynamic range displays such as OLED etc. are urgently needed to display the extra dynamic range (leaving geometry and res aside, the best CRTs still look better than LCD displays when it comes to dynamic range and so does the best film projected by a black-body radiator (tungsten filament) light source.
3. The colour gamut also needs to be widened--look how pathetically limited the current sRGB triangle is on the CIE 1931 color space chromaticity diagram [see Wiki--color gamut]. (Perhaps we even need research into four-coordinate (2 greens) colour systems.)
Preoccupation with image resolution at the expense of gamut and dynamic range seems counterproductive and shortsighted. Moreover, in this digital age, we should not lose sight of how remarkably good a film negative can be when it comes to dynamic range--after all, it's had 150 years development (although the same cannot be said about film's limited colour gamut).
Remember your eye can accommodate (adjust to) a dynamic range of over 10^6 whilst the best LCDs barely make 10^3 (despite the advertising blurb)!
