News + Trends
Samsung at the IFA: 4k was yesterday
by Dominik Bärlocher
Samsung Q900R: AI Upscaling explained
1.9.2018
Translation: machine translated
Video: Stephanie Tresch
For Samsung, "Deadpool 2" is one of the most influential films in film history. An artificial intelligence has watched the film millions of times to improve your films.
The anti-hero Deadpool makes crude jokes, breaks the invisible wall between the film and the audience and uses the word "fuck" liberally. In the second part of the film series, he has to fight a teenager with anger issues.
The computer in Suwon, South Korea, doesn't care. The artificial intelligence in Samsung's research and development lab only cares about one thing: the resolution. Because "Deadpool 2" is one of the first films to be recorded natively in 8k. It is therefore one of the benchmarks of Samsung's new flagship TV, the Q900R.
What's already available in 8k?
Immediately after the company's press conference at the IFA in Berlin, not only journalists but also digitec readers asked themselves the following question:
Is an 8k really necessary?( outside for video producers) Editing to 4k for 1080p is better, as is 8k for 4k, but does the "normal consumer" need an 8k product?
Or:
8K is sooo useless for your own four walls! A standard living room allows a viewing distance of three to five metres. Using the rule of thumb "screen diagonal [cm] * 2.5 = distance [cm]", you get devices with 47" to 80". Even at 80", the pixel density is already very high at 4K. Contrast, colour depth and frequency are the be-all and end-all.
Samsung has also asked itself this question. After all, apart from Deadpool's latest adventure, only very little content is available in such high resolution.
The American fitness brand Rogue Fitness films the documentaries on its YouTube channel in 8k. And I felt as if one of the big tech Youtubers was at least filming in 8k, but then only playing out the data in 4k.
Samsung, however, wants as many people as possible to put their new TV in their homes and have found a solution to create a picture that is as close to 8k as possible with as much content as possible.
AI upscaling explained
The solution with which Samsung is venturing onto the market is called "AI Upscaling" by the manufacturer. In practice, these are 256 filters that have been put together by an artificial intelligence (AI) that has watched "Deadpool 2" too many times.
The AI has seen the film in all possible versions. 4k, FullHD, 480p, 144p and everything in between. Because the AI knows what the film should look like in 8k. So it has applied filters to every scene and every frame of the film and then asked itself a question: Does this now look like the original 8k version? Or is the result completely different?
Depending on what the AI draws from the comparison, it filters similar images in the same way in the hope of achieving the best results. It can also invent new filters and automatically delete old filters, as it may invent a better method for optimising images.
But, and this is important to the Samsung representatives at the brand's stand, your data is not transferred to Samsung. The AI pulls the data from other sources and then plays the 256 filters via over-the-air update (OTA) to your TV. Maybe it watches the Rogue Fitness videos over a million times, in all possible resolutions. Maybe she watches the videos of the Youtuber devinsupertramp or other 8k videos on the internet.
In short: AI doesn't need your data. Not yet. Because the data is already there. The AI knows the TV better than you do. The AI knows every chip, every pixel and every cable. It would need your judgement if nothing else. Was "The Third Man" in 8k okay or did it fail completely? And that's exactly the information Samsung doesn't want from you at the moment. The computer does it on its own. You can then just enjoy the fruits of its labour.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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