$ 0 0 David Shapton explains how the future of video may in fact be pixel-less. There’s a seemingly unstoppable trend towards more and more pixels. Greater resolution is heralded as the future of video. David Shapton doesn’t think it is. He thinks there is another way. It’s a radical suggestion, but completely plausible Living memory is a wonderful thing. For anyone born in the last sixty years, it encompasses more change than any other successive generations have ever seen. And one of the things that we’ve got used to is increasing resolutions. From our perspective, today, it all seems to have happened very quickly. Anyone working in professional video today will have very clear memories of Standard Definition video. Some of us still use it! But the current working paradigm is HD. Next on the horizon Next on the horizon is 4K. And, with almost unseemly haste, we’re already talking about 8K. In fact, some organisations, like Sony and the BBC, kind-of lump together any video formats with greater than HD resolution, using expressions like “Beyond Definition” (although in Sony’s case, that also means that resolution isn’t everything and that there are other factors like increased colour gamut and contrast that matter as well). Everyone wants better pictures. There’s nothing wrong with the principle that – all things being equal – if you can record your images in a high resolution format, then you probably should. The idea of digital video is now so well established that it’s virtually passed into folklore. At the very least, the word “Pixel” is bandied around as if it’s always been part of the language. In reality, it’s not been around for very long. Cathode ray tubes don’t use pixels, and nor do VHS recorders or any type of analogue video equipment. Red Shark News | Read the Full Article