At Sony Studios, gearing up for the 4K TV revolution

-If you thought you were done upgrading your television, you were wrong. Get ready for 4K TV, that means twice the number of horizontal and twice the number of vertical pixels for four times the overall number of pixels on the screen. The result? Better picture, better clarity, and better detail. At Sony Pictures Studios here at L.A., they are ready for and possibly even launching the 4K revolution. They're designing new cameras, shooting all new content, and remastering that big library of movies and TV. So, let's talk about 4K specifically. What does that mean for consumers? -What we're doing with ultra high def is expanding the range of colors that we can actually put on the screen. We're expanding a range of contrast so that the bright is bright, the highlights that reflect off of something can really be truly as much higher than the things around them as they would be in real life and increase a greater sense of immersion, more realism in looking at the picture. -[unk] -To make that realism and immersion possible, Sony has built some new cameras that can shoot 4K and even 8K native content. 8K blasts all the way to 7680 x 4320 pixel resolution. So, we're gonna find out what we look like on 4K, they're rolling on us, and then what are some of the things that you can do with the digital image that comes out of a camera like this. -Well, one of the things we've done with this is when you decode the picture, you can decode it as a 4K picture or you can decode it as a 6K or 8K. And what that means you can do is that you can reposition within the picture. You can zoom in. You can blow up parts of the picture and still have a full 4K image. -And the 4K operation goes on over at Colorworks, Sony's main hub for postproduction. Specialists work on scanning and color correcting 4K content and remastering older shows and movies into 4K. Today, they're restoring Lawrence of Arabia into 4K frame by frame. What's amazing to film nerds is that they're resurrecting these movies from the original 35-mm negative instead of a processed print. As a result, there's no image degradation because 35 mm was actually the 4K of its day. Here's the before image of Lawrence of Arabia. And for after, we got a change to visit Sony's viewing space. The difference won't be visible to you, but trust me, it's major. -So, if you can press in to see the detail, you'll see that there's a great deal more detail in the horses. You can see that the image holds up even when you blow it up and double it. -So, you could just zoom and zoom? -Certainly. -I mean, even to the naked eye and even standing off frame, pops out like you said. -Right. -I mean, you can see the difference is phenomenal. The 4K TV story is even more than just the pixels. New 4K TVs can also display more colors than existing HD TV sets. All that translates into a new specification called ultra high definition or ultra HD. It also means ultra high prices at least for now. Prices are coming down, but expect to pay between $5,000 all the day up to $40,000 for a 4K TV. So, what is the future of 4K? Consumers are just starting to learn about it. You guys are way ahead of the game. What's it gonna look like in two or three years? -I expect that it's going to be a little bit like we've seen with HD and I think that it's reasonable to expect that, you know, within the next three to five years that 4K displays are gonna be more and more common. -So, 4K is inevitable and you'll be there.