Of course! But it may not be the way one may think. Although we are certainly capable of producing TV in 4K/UHTV (2160p) or SHDTV (4320p) and reproducing the same, bandwidth limitations remain the real problem for distributing this level of quality. With 4G interactive personal communications gobbling up most of the usable spectrum and assuming most, if not all, local interconnections will be wireless, there is simply not enough air left for real-time UHDTV - unless one wants to watch Monday Night Football on Tuesday night.

So, what is needed is a whole new approach to reproducing television images that is relatively immune to bandwidth limitations. One approach that offers the most promise is one based on the imaging concept of “modeling. This idea closely emulates the way the human brain is thought to process images. In essence, a vast amount of high resolution image “elements are stored in memory. To evoke each element and build complete pictures, only codes representing “models are transmitted. In this manner, the accuracy of the image, not its intrinsic resolution, is determined by channel bandwidth as the transmitted codes are relatively very small packets of data.

The mathematical transforms for the modeling codes have been developed and the imager ROM requirements estimated. Needless to say, the memory requirements are vast - about 1K orders of magnitude greater than any found in today's consumer products. The enabling technology awaits the economic commercialization of quantum memory systems that should be demonstrated within ten to fifteen years. In the meantime we will just have to struggle along with these vastly inferior 1080p real-time images - if we could only get them!

Ed

April 1, 2012