What is 4K?
As with most things in life and business, it is always good to put your best foot forward. And that applies to any and all marketing images that are representing you. Our business is full of technical jargon, but one that also lends itself to you seeing as a consumer would be the display format. Years ago you may have rented VHS tapes, bought a newer Blu-rays player or streamed HD across the web. 4K is a new high quality evolution of the commitment to the very best image quality.
A little history
When I grew up XX years ago, we had multiple color TVs in the house, (not black and white….I am not THAT old) and most were big CRTs encased in even bigger pieces of furniture. We watched movies on cable TV and recorded family events and soap operas on VHS videotapes. These “tube” TVs had 400-500 lines of resolution. Later on, if they were digital displays (LCD?) we called them by their pixel size equivalent, about 720x480. These were pretty standard, hence we call that standard resolution, or SD (480). Our first camera systems recorded in this format.
Enter High definition or HD
Then in the quest for higher resolution presentations they over to high definition which came in 2 main flavors, 720 and 1080. And their corresponding pixel sizes were 1280x720 and 1920 x 1080. (For today;’s post we are not going to get into frame rates today, as you most likely saw these referred to as 720p and 1080i in the early days). Sometimes 1080 was referred to as Full HD. We are proud that we were first in the local social event segment to utilize HD24p for productions. Even though we all thought HD was the end-all-be-all, everyone from movie makers and computer displays soon wanted even more resolution and detail.
Enter 4K
The current consumer display format is 4K, which actually is 3840x2160 or 4096x2160 which is the “K” piece in 4K (K being 1000 in computer speak). You’ve seen these big TVs for sale, with sometimes commensurate big prices. Many computers and phones match these pixel sizes and resolutions already. So it would be appropriate to acquire you digital assets in at least as good depth as consumers (to say nothing of business) are expecting and used to watching at home. So we made the choice to move to 4K production about 1 year ago. Most of our production are now filmed in 4K which enables very high quality images, color depth, and clarity. Of course more pixels requires better lenses. More pixels generates more and more data which requires faster computers to process and store.
Having been used to these constant format changes, we have always invested in top gear and have managed to bring down the cost of 4K production to an absolutely affordable level. Talk to us about having your next product or service, message or presentation captured in the amazing quality and clarity of 4K.
