Japanese public television, NHK has turned to IntoPIX (Mont-St-Guibert) to ensure it remains at the forefront of image quality. The latest box designed by the UCL spin-off can be used to compress and rapidly transmit image signals of up to 8k, the absolute best, which could revolutionise the television of the future.

In the last 10 years, IntoPIX has developed a technology that can compress and restore an image without loss of quality, and do so increasingly quickly. These microprocessors have gone from 1k to 4k and today their resolution has reached 8k with breathtaking colours and clarity. As a comparison, this is quadruple the 4k technology increasingly used by the latest generation screens, which "corresponds to 16 times what the average well-equipped person receives as image quality into their living room in Europe", explains Michel Van Dorpe, the IntoPIX representative in Japan.

Such image quality therefore needs to be compressed to avoid overloads and handling difficulties. "With the Tico codec developed by IntoPIX, the initial quality is preserved instantly (in under a millisecond), which is valuable for audiovisual production, but also for cinema. In the United States, Sony, which is another long-standing IntoPIX customer, has also fitted all its cinemas with this technology", continues Michel Van Dorpe.

Japanese TV engineers have told Echo journalists that, in order to remain at the forefront in the future, they also intend to approach another leading Walloon company on the market, EVS, which specialises in extreme slow motion.

Source: L’Echo