I'm going to pick up on a subject that I have ranted about a lot. Looking back, however, it is actually 11 years since I devoted a whole editorial to the topic.

One of our news items recently was about the ITU adoption of the Japanese Super-Hi Vision concept for 7680 x 4320 Ultra High Definition TV (we reported on the NHK demo at IBC in our show report). That's 33 megapixels, or 16 times more pixels than 'Full' HD displays. It's four times as much as the '4K' displays being used in high end digital cinema projectors and medical displays. Yet still, our industry does not understand the 'power of the megapixel'. Still, we continue to use phrases such as 4K display or 8K display that only highlights the horizontal resolution, not the full resolution.

I have ranted for years about the same approach to screen diagonals. A display that has twice the diagonal (and the same aspect ratio) has four times the screen area. Would Intel describe the clock speed of its CPUs by giving them a number that is the square root of the clock speed? If Intel went from 1GHz to 2GHz, would the company really give customers a number that is just 40% bigger? Ah, we've gone from 1 IntelMark to 1.4 IntelMarks. No chance! So why don't we describe the display in terms of its area? (Let me add, I understand the technical reasons, but I'm talking marketing here. Whenever I have asked this question of display marketeers, I have never been given the correct technical reasons!)

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