Posted on Tuesday, September 30 2008 @ 9:05 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Hitachi
announced it's working on a "super resolution technology" that will upscale SDTV and DVD images to images with resolutions close to 1920 x 1080, and convert HDTV images into images with even higher definition. The firm says the first LCD and Plasma TVs with this new technology are expected in 2010.
"The resolution is estimated by analyzing the luminance signals of input images before performing the super resolution processing for multiple regions at a time," said Koichi Hamada, chief researcher of the Embedded System Platform Research Laboratory in the Central Research Laboratory of Hitachi Ltd.
Thus, the technology is capable of selectively performing different processing for SDTV and HDTV images that coexist on the same screen of a TV program, such as of relay broadcasting. In addition, the technology can distinguish a region that should be displayed sharply (eg, close view) from a region that needs to be somewhat blurred (eg, background).
Therefore, by properly applying this technology to each of the regions, images can be displayed without affecting perspective, the company said.
The existing technologies for super resolution "were not effective enough because they only enhanced the definition of images with a certain resolution at a fixed rate, for example, conversion of SDTV images into HDTV images," Hamada said.
Here's a preview, it looks pretty impressive:
