Friday, November 13, 2009

4K demonstration

Kino Tulio, Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto, Sörnäisten rantatie 25, Helsinki.

We have installed Finland's first 4K projector (Sony) in our Kino Tulio screening room at our new premises. We saw samples of blu-ray discs and a 4K test programme.
- Flowers in the Netherlands
- A sample of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
- Monkeys in a hot spring on a snowy hillside
- A volcano
- Time lapse photo of New York traffic shot from a skyscraper
- India
- Mecca

The blu-ray: I have never seen a better presentation of a home viewing format. But a great 16mm presentation is equally good.

4K: the image is ultra-sharp.
Depth of focus is excellent.
The image can carry great detail from a long distance: a street of New York seen from the top of ?Empire State Building?, ?the Himalaya?, the pilgrims at Mecca.
But the colour in the test is highly saturated, artificially bright and unnatural.
A sense of atmosphere and temperature is missing.
Even the summer scenes feel cool.

We discussed that test shows are produced by engineers, not by artists. Engineers seem to emphasize sharpness and focus and neglect other important parameters.

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