21:9 UHD TV from Samsung & LG

Samsung-curved-UHD-TV

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas can be a  window on where we are heading with brave new formats.

New 21:9 UHD widescreen 105″ TVs will be shown Jan 7 -10 by Samsung and LG. Do the math. Yikes, that’s 2.33:1. Not 2.39:1 or 2.35:1. Or maybe it’s 2.37:1, if you count pixels. The 105-inch curved Samsung and LG TVs have 11 million pixels (5120 x 2160).

Also inscrutable is why these TVs are curved. Perhaps you will pack your living room with an entire neighborhood of guests all clamoring for equal opportunity of a Cinerama style mini experience. Or maybe, because this is even higher resolution for widescreen than what you’d see projected in a theater, it’s intended to compete. (DCI spec for widescreen projected 4K  is equally inscrutable at 4096 x 1714.)

The winners could be the makers and renters of the new wave of anamorphic 2x lenses and high performance spherical lenses with excellent performance all the way to those wide screen edges.

And how will content be delivered? Overnight downloadable on demand, slightly faster than Fedex next day Air. But I vote for SD cards. An 8 GB card costs around $6 and doesn’t need any moving parts like a DVD or Blu-ray player.

 

 

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2 Responses:

  1. James says:

    How exactly are you doing the math for the aspect ratio?

    Thanks,
    James

    • Jon Fauer says:

      James: Here are my calculations. Samsung calls it a 21:9 TV. So 21÷9=2.33. If we calculate with the pixels, 5120÷2160=2.37.

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