TV companies cry out for Quad HD as 50″ hits £399

When your local supermarket has a decent 50″ LG HD TV for £399, you know that the whole industry is in trouble. Quad HD cannot come quick enough as interest in gimmicks like 3D slides and everyone already has a flat panel. KitGuru snaps a late night bargain.

When the Millennium Dome was built (it's now called the O2 arena kiddies), there was a huge contract available to supply something like 1,000 of the new-fangled 42″ plasma TV screen thingies. It was worth a fortune because, at the time, the screens were trading between £15,000 and £18,000. Rumour has it that a fledgling Guru nailed the deal for something like £12,000 a screen and so the Dome sprang to live in vivid colour.

Over time, the prize of plasmas fell from ‘Industry deals only' over the £10,000 mark, to the £5,000 ‘rich sods only need apply for bragging rights' and down below the ‘£1k anyone can have one'.

LED followed the same path (standard and back-lit) – and so has 3D.

Without a new technology in the pipeline, TV companies are going to struggle even more to survive. And that means Quad HD (or 4K to give it the content producer's name).

Only problem is that even if the Quad TVs themselves drop in price (which we have already been tracking on KitGuru), where will the 4K content come from?

We know that Sky has been happy to broadcast a crappy HD signal for a while, so maybe they will be shamed into moving from 720p to 1080p, which would help – of the industry could follow Apple's example.

Anyone who bought an iPad 3 would have noticed that the 2,048 pixels wide Retina display wasn't used in the traditional PC way – to increase desktop real estate. Instead, everything kept its 1,024 look and feel – but suddenly had 4 times as many pixels packed into the same area.

The added ‘dots' makes a big difference to image quality – and doesn't need new content to delivery the benefit.

While you ponder what might be needed to save the TV industry, here's a shot of Asda's latest deal: An LG 50″ HD TV with ultra thin bezel for £399. Sure it isn't ‘top spec', but – for £399 – what do you want?

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KitGuru says: Without doubt, the TV industry needs to move to the new standard as soon as possible, but with consoles only based on an APU – are we going to be looking at up-scaling engines expanding our textures or will the industry create ‘auto AA' like Apple?

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