Just got back from the alpha­bet soup of DIMA / PMA / CES. 

The big buzz at CES of course was “Ultra HD” aka 4K or 4KTV.

Like HDTV before it, a 4K tele­vi­sion takes sharp­ness to a new level. There are about 4 times as many hor­i­zon­tal lines of res­o­lu­tion in a 4K TV image, than in a nor­mal (maxed out, 1080p) HDTV image. And the 4K TV has about 8 times the res­o­lu­tion of a “Reg­u­lar Def” TV.

We saw 4K TVs in:

• Nor­mal mode — really sharp
• 3D mode — qual­ity var­ied by brand
• Dou­ble frame rate - OMG, see below

Nor­mal 4K TV:

OK, yes, much sharper than a 1080p image. But hon­estly not the same wow-factor as the first time I saw a true 1080p image with a good demo video.

Just stand­ing in front of the normal-mode 4K TVs, it seemed that the vari­a­tion in the video itself mat­tered more to the expe­ri­ence than the dis­play. These videos var­ied by con­tent obvi­ously (snazzy sexy images catch atten­tion, sub­tle images actu­ally bet­ter for eval­u­a­tion), but also by tech specs.

Would I turn down a free one?  No. But would I pony up to replace my 720p Plasma in our house right now? No, I would not.

3D Mode

Here, we saw quite a dif­fer­ence in expe­ri­ence between LG & Samsung.

LG has an amaz­ing entrance to their “booth” (more like a “planet”) where staffers hand you 3D glasses, and walk under a wall of 3D dis­plays. They achieved the desired effect, we were all wowed.

Vis­it­ing Planet LG, we got to see lots of vari­a­tions on the theme of 3D. In all cases, the 3D effect was smooth, clean, con­vinc­ing, and with­out notice­able eye­strain for me or my col­league Lee Varis.

Lee looks cool, even in 3D Glasses.

A friend who’s an expert in things Home The­ater has always advised us to avoid LG. I had a bad time with an LG Blu-Ray burner, and was sur­prised that their site had not even the barest instruc­tions or sup­port, much less access to some­one who could help.

But with that said, the LG 3D per­for­mance appeared clearly supe­rior to both me ‘n Lee.

Now Sam­sung has come on like a jug­ger­naut in the world of elec­tron­ics. They are now a seri­ous threat to the once invin­ci­ble Apple in hand-held devices, and have left once-legendary names like Sony in the dust.

Lee & I both assumed Sam­sung would be worlds ahead of LG. But… when we put the Sam­sung glasses on for the first time, we both imme­di­ately felt the eye strain. OK, let’s try a dif­fer­ent TV. Same expe­ri­ence. OK, let’s try a third Sam­sung dis­play.  Same thing for both of us. I don’t know what dif­fer­ence, if any, there is in the LG vs. Sam­sung 3D tech­nol­ogy. And hav­ing com­piled plenty of sta­tis­tics in my time, it’s pos­si­ble these obser­va­tions were aberrations.

But I doubt it.

Regard­ing 3D real­ism, here again LG seemed the clear win­ner. Mak­ing this asser­tion is tougher, since we were not view­ing the same video on two com­pet­ing TVs.

But still…we know the ven­dors would be putting their best foot forward.

And I’m always sus­pi­cious of “slow mov­ing” sub­jects. It’s a lot eas­ier to make a video with slo-mo sub­jects look great, than fast-moving sub­jects. Samsung’s 3D demos used slower mov­ing sub­jects than LG’s.

Inci­den­tally, that’s why Plasma-type HDTVs have always been such  win­ners: they refreshes many time faster than even the fastest LCD dis­plays. They just don’t “shine as bright” at the store, so we’re not drawn to them. But very few of us watch TV in brightly lit rooms. Much more likely the TV will be viewed in some form of “mod­ern cave” environment.

Dou­ble Frame Rate aka 60p aka 60 Frames Per Second

OK, this was my biggest wow moment of CES, by a lot.

Tucked against a back wall, in Planet LG, my eye caught a lit­tle sign over one of the hun­dreds of 4K TV pan­els. The sign said “60P”.

Yes, I was a mem­ber of the A/V club as a kid. So I sus­pected this might be a TV play­ing a video with twice as many frames as a nor­mal 30 frames per sec­ond video. My lit­tle Kodak water­proof cam­era has a 720p 60p set­ting. The dif­fer­ence has always been dra­matic, espe­cially for action subjects.

So I asked the young geek demo dude if the 60p sign meant 60 FPS. “Yes!” He seemed excited that some­one noticed. Then, in some­thing resem­bling a hushed tone, he said “This is only exper­i­men­tal, you can­not buy these!” And so I felt like a cool old geek get­ting to share this moment with a cool young geek.

Lis­ten folks, when I put those glasses on, and watched the 3D 4K 60p video, chills hap­pened. In fact, as I’m writ­ing this, no joke, still gives me chills.

Yes, the video was the clas­sic “slow” video. The sub­ject, an old Asian man walk­ing among sheets of beau­ti­ful fab­ric, gen­tly blow­ing on a set of clothes lines.

But I was stand­ing there with him, with the gor­geous laun­dry. My instincts told me I could call him, and he’d turn around. Never in my life have I had more sense of “being there.”

The above video is NOT 3D. But if you view at “orig­i­nal qual­ity” on a fast com­puter, you should see the smooth­ness & detail of 4K 60fps. Caveat: down­load may take a while.

It’s harder and harder to get a wow reac­tion with any new tech. Years ago, we all just began to expect to be blown away every few years by some­thing amaz­ing & new from the gad­get world.

So to feel such an effect seemed special.

Can’t wait for these 4K 3D 60p TVs to go on sale, and for match­ing video con­tent to watch.