RED comes back with claims of 4K projection on DVD

[Elandyll]

And seriously, I don't know what to think of it now.

If it is real, and is not some kind of smoke blown up our collective rear ends, then I will admit that they have developped an incredible technology, borderline magic.

http://www.engadgethd.com/2009/04/25...readercomments

They had already made a claim about Red Ray last year, but without being able to actually show anything. This time, they made an actual demo...
4K footage at 10Mb/s (megabit, not byte)...

Now for those already thinking "Blu Ray Death", a few points to consider:
- does not include multichannel audio, or any format in and of itself. It's just a compression format storaged on a DVD at 10mb/s.
- the amount of processing power on the player (decompression) end is unknown. Could require a dozen Cell processors for all we know. As per the power needed to achieve that kind of efficiency in compression (700:1), it is literally in the domain of applied magic.
- RED RAY is, at least for now, meant for the professional market and 4K footage. There is no indication of their format being adaptable to streaming, or if anyone will be interested in using it for Home Video apps. Given the time it takes to see new formats on the consumer level market, it could be years before anything is developped.

RED blows away small room of videophiles with 4k RED RAY footage at half the bitrate of MiniDV
by Paul Miller, posted Apr 25th 2009 at 3:48PM

While RED has been pretty tight-lipped about its planned RED RAY product, some footage shown off at RED's NAB party gave a sizable hint that RED RAY could be much more than meets the eye -- specifically a $1,000 device that can play cinema-quality 4k video off of standard DVDs. At the party they played an uncompressed showreel of 4k footage on a Sony 4k projector, which clocked in at 1.3GB per second, and then showed that exact same footage under the "RED RAY" codec at a mere 10Mb/s (megabits, not bytes; about half the bitrate of SD DV), at a compression rate of 700:1. Attendees claimed they could see zero visible compression, though a projector in a ballroom isn't exactly the best case scenario to test that sort of thing. Unfortunately, there's little other info about how they're achieving this (we hear "wavelets" come into the equation at some point), or to what nefarious aims, but with compression like this the implications for content distribution are pretty stunning: 1080p+ streaming for all. Naturally, the down side of all of this is probably some pretty hefty processing power on the consumer end, but we'll cross that I/O bridge when we come to it.

Again if this is real, the potential of this compression technology + GE based Holographic projection 500Gb discs boggles the mind (and would be compatible Blu Ray).