The ITU-R working party 6C has officially defined the parameter values for the next two generations of television formats.
Under their current name the two formats are the 4K and 8K UHDTV formats – Ultra High Definition Television.
The working party is the same group that defined the parameter values for HDTV and the 720p families in the late 1990s. WP6C is chaired by David Wood from the EBU Technology and Development Department.
Lieven Vermaele, EBU Director of Technology and Development commented: “Facilitating these superb pictures hasn’t been made possible overnight – this represents over ten years of technical discussion and experiment. It has been a long journey – but we are delighted to have arrived at this point and pleased that the EBU has been able to make a contribution to broadcasting history.”
The new formats take advantage of future displays’ greater colour range, have the option of ‘constant luminance’ encoding, and allow up to 120 pictures/second.
Discussions to broadcast these systems currently centre on the to date largely unused 22GHz satellite broadcast band, but terrestrial broadcasting may eventually be possible.
Tests of the UHDTV format will take place at the London Olympics.
