BBC to make HD out of date

It may seem to be the early days of HD, but already the BBC have been working with the Japanese broadcaster NHK to produce a system that will make the broadcast thirty three times more detailed than the best equipment can at the moment. This system is to be called Super Hi Vision and the BBC are already planning to use this format on huge screens located in city centres for the 2012 Olympics that will be held in London.

In Japan the Broadcaster is looking to be making test broadcasts for this system, while the long term view is that Super Hi Vision will be broadcasting full time by 2025. So there is a long way to go before there is a mass change over of TV equipment.

Putting this into practice is not as easy though, at present there is only a demonstration system up and running in the NHK lab. However the process is complicated with only twenty minutes of footage being recorded at a time and even then it has to be edited frame by frame. This process means that it will take virtually a whole week to produce just one hour of material.