Technabob » resolution

The Pixelated Man

Technabob — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 04:27:35 +0000

At first glance, this sculpture might look like it’s made out of LEGO blocks, but it’s actually an intricate handcrafted work of art by Swedish sculptor Thomas Broomé.

The artist’s Low Res Man was fabricated from thousands of precisely arranged 1cm see-through acrylic cubes, then painted to look like a real person when viewed from a great distance. Upon closer inspection, he degrades into a low resolution, bitmapped shell of a man. The sculpture is loaded up with ropelights on the inside, so he lights up when plugged in.

Can you tell the difference between the real people and the fake plastic one in the exciting party shot above? I had a hard time myself.

[via Core77 (thanks for the tip, roadsidescholar!)]

High Def Hqv Benchmark Disc Finally Available

Technabob — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 04:15:56 +0000

One of my biggest frustrations with high definition television has been the lack of decent test materials for verifying image quality. Up until now, pretty much all of the test and benchmarking discs out there came in lowly 480i resolution, designed for playback on standard DVD players.

Fortunately, Silicon Optix has answered the call by releasing high definition versions of their popular HQV Benchmark discs. The $20 discs are available in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats and recorded at 1080i resolution, the benchmarks are designed for testing for noise, resolution, “jaggies” and other annoying image artifacts to see if your video processing is up to snuff.

So if you’ve wanted to put your new HD equipment through its paces, or just to test out the latest gear at the electronics store, now is your chance.

[via ecoustics]

Super High Definition Tells 1080p Who’s Boss

Technabob — Wed, 30 May 2007 03:07:06 +0000

The new technology, called Super Hi-Vision (SHV) was shown off to reporters in Tokyo recently, and has an astounding 7680 x 4320 resolution. To put that in perspective, you’d need to connect sixteen of the highest resolution 1080p monitors you can buy in a 4 x 4 grid to reproduce that quality.

Don’t throw away your new HDTV just yet. For now, SHV will be reserved for only special venues where bandwidth can be doled out in a controlled environment. It will be many years before broadcast and wired networks will be capable of handling this volume of data.

Uncompressed, SHV signals require a whopping 24 Gbps of bandwidth, which is completely impractical to broadcast. Japanese broadcaster NHK has managed to cram that down to “just” 128Mbps, that’s still six to eight times more bandwidth than today’s highest quality over-the-air high def programming, which is already suffers from a dearth of available bandwidth.

[via Digital World Tokyo via Ubergizmo]

Seitz 160 Megapixel Camera

Technabob — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 17:50:06 +0000

Think your new-fangled 10 megapixel camera is hot stuff? Professional photographers can now pick up a camera that captures up to 160 million pixels in a single shot.

The Seitz 6×17 is a panoramic high definition digital camera with an unbelievable resolution of 7,500 by 21,250 pixels. Unlike some high-end professional cameras that can take minutes to capture a high resolution image, this one can do it in under a second. The Seitz does this by processing a whopping 300MB of raw data per second and move it to a tablet PC controller using a gigabit Ethernet connection. All this technology comes at a steep price though, with the system running anywhere from $35,000 to $40,000.

[via NOTCOT]