8K Ultra HD Camera & H.265 Encoder Developed

Engineers at NHK are developing an 8K Ultra HD television and the broadcasts are expected to begin in Japan in 2016. The camera head required is being jointly developed with Astrodesign and the initial prototypes are much compact and lightweight; with total weight approximately about 2 Kg. The engineering team has been successful in packing a 33MP image sensor and all the surrounding driving circuits inside a 10cm x 10cm box. The image sensor itself is just 25mm diagonally, which allowed the lens to be made compact as well. The lens is particularly used in digital cinema recordings, but now it can be used to capture Ultra High-Definition videos as well.


The monitor has 4K resolution, but the signal processing is 8K. The team says that the image sensor itself can run at 120 Hz, however the signal processing component is not ready for it yet. The display, therefore, runs at 60Hz.

NHK has also developed the world's first HEVC/H.265 real-time encoder for 8K Ultra HD video. HEVC is the latest video encoding system and has been accepted as a standard this year. Compared to MPEG2, this code has 4x compression efficiency. While encoding an Ultra HD video with a very high resolution, encoding is done in real-time by dividing the screen in 17 strips. Compression to 85 Mbps enables on Ultra HD channel to be transmitted using one satellite transponder.
Check out following video to see it all in action -