While I sit here typing away with James Bond; Tomorrow Never Dies playing in the background on our seven year old standard definition (SD) television, people around the world are snapping up the latest in technology - High Definition (HD) televisions. With the chance to watch much better quality TV, and with prices becoming lower and lower you can’t blame people for moving over.

But already, the next generation of TV’s have started being developed, in the form of Ultra High Definition (UHD). Back in November 2005, the Japanese public service broadcaster, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), first demonstrated the technology, but with the recent news development has begun, it only shows that we’re one step closer to it becoming a reality in our homes.

Now, how does UHD compare to HD you may ask? Well, its alot. An awful lot. If UHD was a Ferrari, HD would be an everyday Ford, and SD would be, well, a Skoda. An old Skoda at that, from 1981. Anyways, UHD is capable of a very impressive 7680 x 4320 resolution compared to 1080p HD (thats the decent HD, not the cheap ass HD) which broadcasts at 1920 x 1080. Yes, I know that’s alot of numbers which probably mean less to you than anything. But, in a nut shell, you would need 16 HD TV’s, placed into a 4 x 4 grid to replicate what UHD TV can produce.

To make it easier to understand and actually visualise, the image on the right is an accurate representation of the sheer magnitude of UHD TV. The blue area represents UHD TV, the yellow area represents 1080p HD TV, and the white area is 720p HD TV. The picture quality is undoubtly un imaginable until we actually see it for real, but my question is, what size TV would you need to make UHD TV actually worth it?

But with this increased resolution brings an increased file size for video and television broadcast. One minute of uncompressed video footage is 194GB, which would mean a two hour movie would need approximately 25TB of storage, (thats 25,000GB). The transfer rate currently is 24 Gigabits a second, something which is unbelivable in todays current broadcast systems. This is one of the biggest hurdles at the moment facing this new technology. The video data would have to be encoded to be able to be broadcast to make it feasable, but seeing as how at the moment each encoding unit (you technically need 2, one at the broadcast end (ie. TV Studio) and one in the TV itself) being as tall as a person, they would need to be the size of a few chips able to fit into the back of a TV to make this technology work.

Either way, there’s no doubt UHD TV is years and years off yet, so there’s no need to throw away those sparkly new Blu-ray and HD DVD’s just yet, but it does go to show that one day we will have to again, and with his new technology already in development, it’s only a matter of time.