What's the next step after Blu-ray and HD-DVD?

Question

How much more room for progress and improvements in picture quality do we have? A movie source is filmed with a defined quality, are there forseeable advances in increasing the source quality as well?

Answer 1

35 mm film can be scanned at 2000-4000 line vertical resolution (compare to 1080), so there is still room for older movies to be improved past 1080p for digital presentation. Most masters being done now for Blu-ray and HD DVD are done at these resolutions (I've read that one recent movie -- I forget which one -- took over a terrabyte of storage, so disk capacity for such formats would still be an issue. Forget Blu-ray, think Digital Hollographic Disk (DHD).

There are actually several changes that will likely be made:

1) Colour Space: Blu-ray and HD DVD both use the BT709 colour space (that's basically the gamut of colours allowed to describe the images). This is a wider colour space than that used for DVD, but is still narrower than the xvYCC colour space that could be used (Sony HDTVs and some others are already being designed to handle this if program maetrial is made available). And since film captured these extra colours they are available to be put on "disk".

2) Colour Depth: HD DVD and Blu-ray are "8 bit" colour. That means each of the 3 primary primary colours can have 256 different gradiations or 16 million possible colours. While this sounds like plenty it can lead to banding when fine degrees of colour change are required. An increase to 10 bit (or more likely 12 bit) would give billions of colours ... solving any possible banding problems.

3) Resolution: As indicated above resolution improvements to 1440p or 2080p are quite possible. The latter is available now in commercial digital cinema projectors (starting at $110,000 each!).

I suspect the successor to Blu-ray/HD DVD isn't that far away, in the form of some combination of 1440p resolution and 10 or 12 bit xvYCC colour.

In the long term 3D or even holographic imaging is potentially possible.

So ... bottom line ... there is a lot of improvement still possible. Whether much of it will be quick or financially viable is another question. After all some people are still using VCRs and Laserdisks. Probably a premium niche format initially ... with gradual adoption by others as hardware catches up at the average consumer level. That said, probably 5 years minimum.

Answer 2

Nothing for a while.  the tv industry hates change just look at how long it took to go from black and white to color then to HD.  HD will be the highest quality picture for a while at least..

Answer 3

I think that they will make holographic films where you can actually 'live' the movie and be in the middle of the action. If they do this they will definitely need to make much larger storage options...

Answer 4

Thats kind of a strange question.

BluRay and HD-DVD are simply delivery mechanisms for HDTV.  

You are NOT going to get any improvement in picture quality beyond 1080p because that is the highest resolution standard we have.

The old 480 standard which we still have to support was fixed in late 1940. So it took us over 60 years (and an act of congress) to get any improvement.

I would say HDTV standard is going to be around for at least 20 years.

Answer 5

Well unless there is some dramatic change in the way movies are watched, the only 'next step' will be increased resolution and higher capacity discs. If by then they dont eliminate the whole compact disc thing im gonna go postal.  I shouldnt have to treat my movies like they are made of glass. I should be able to just throw them around like a usb stick drive or something like that.  So hopefully the next format is solid state and not a scratchable disc