This week I bought my HDTV Ready (720p) 32″ Samsung TV, and the first thing I read is that Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK – the Japanese govermental broadcaster) has started developing something they have called Super Hi-Vision. NHK already started with HDTV broadcasts back in mid-1990s. Regular HDTV sendings started in 2000! Quite a few years before Europe.

So what differs Super Hi-Vision from HDTV? Full HDTV can have the resolution 1920 x 1080 piksler (1080p), Super Hi-Vision will have 7680×4320 pixels! If you know your math, you will see that one Super Hi-Vision TV would have 16 times higher resolution then Full HDTVs, in other words 16 Full HDTVs will fit in to one Super Hi-Vision TV. While 1080p has 2 million pixels (2 MP), Super Hi-Vision consists of 33 million pixels (33 MP).

And how far is this technology away? I don’t know really. But NHK presented their new SHV video camera yesterday. They show pictures of a newspaper taken on a three meters distance, and the text was fully readable. Something not possible with HDTV. And what did the Japanese say: Sugoii! (A Japanese expression for “Oh shit”). SHV-signals has a bit rate of 24 GBps, something no current broadcasting system is capable of transmitting.

Well, the good thing is that it will take years before my TV will become obsolete in Europe. If ever!

Super Hi-Vision compared with HDTV