In Broadcast - July 2017 - 21

21

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 7 - Issue 6

InReply

Hitachi Kokusai
Keep Eye On 'VoIP'
John J. Humphrey, Vice President of
Business Development, Hitachi Kokusai
Electric America Ltd., discusses the
roadmap and touches on some of the
products launched at NAB 2017...
InBroadcast: Can you give us
a brief overview of what we can
expect in the next few months
within your sector?
John J. Humphrey: We
cover four main vertical
markets:
Broadcast,
Corporate/Education,
Sports
mobile/
venues, and Houses of
Worship.
Each vertical has similarities
and differences: I personally
separate camera customers into
two broad categories; businesses
whose primary product is video,
like TV stations and mobile sports.
Separately, those who are in another
business, but use video to improve
the connection with their viewers,
like churches and education. Budgets,
priorities and technical knowledge are
often very different. We make a very
wide range of cameras from small
HD box cameras to 8K production
cameras for these diverse markets.
InB: Any specific product/s taking
centre stage this year?
JJH: For the Houses of Worship
market, we introduced the Z-HD5500
camera at NAB show. The new
Z-HD5500 camera is full 1080p
throughout and uses our firstever CMOS global shutter imager.
This new imager greatly reduces
artefacts caused by inexpensive LED
lighting and LED displays used in
some churches. LED lighting is not

High Dynamic
Range for HDTV

Hitachi Z-HD5500 with global shutter

a problem with high-performance
stabilised LED lights used in most TV
studios.
For the mobile sports market, the
new CU-HD1300 CCU can accept
either triax or SMPTE fibre camera
cable. Sports venues have a variety of
legacy triax and SMPTE fibre cables.
By changing the camera head adapter
you're ready to connect to a different
type of camera cable. In addition, an
optional 4K upconverter board uses
the new 12G single SDI connector,
instead of four cables with quad-link
SDI.
InB: What challenges did you face
when designing / launching the
product/service?
JJH: Technology is moving so fast
today that when you plan a product,
you have to guess where the industry
will be when the product becomes
available to the marketplace. We
respond to our customers' needs and

those needs are always changing and
evolving over time.
InB: Which territories do you
think will show particular interest?
JJH: I only work the Americas and
we see South America improving.
InB: Any future product/service
innovations ahead that you can
discuss?
JJH: We are carefully watching VoIP
(I have changed VoIP in this context to
mean Video over IP). SMPTE and ITU
Standards are evolving. There are still
a number of players pulling standards
in their direction. When there is an
industry consensus, we will be ready
to deliver HD and UHD video over
high-speed data networks.
HDR standards and techniques are
evolving, and HD-HDR is very hot right
now because you get a huge picture
improvement for relatively low cost.
HDR is due to new thinking in display
technologies and capabilities.
HDR has been much less of a
camera issue because MOS and
CMOS imagers have always had
lots of overhead for HDR.

Hitachi Kokusai participated in a
number of sessions at NAB's Broadcast
Engineering and IT Conference (BEITC).
John J. Humphrey presented on a
technical session on 'High Dynamic
Range for HDTV'.
UHD/4K and High Dynamic Range
(HDR) are usually mentioned together,
but HDTV can also benefit from HDR
because most people sit too far from
their TVs to see the full resolution of
UHD/4K.
A properly set up 1080p image with
HDR will look better than a UHD image
with Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) at
typical viewing distances.
Also covered was HDR format
compatibility with existing SDR TVs
and how viewer experiences can
be enhanced with different HDR
standards.

InB: Thank you for taking
the time to answer our
questions.
CU-HD1300 CCU can accept either
triax or SMPTE fibre camera cable

Illustration from the presentation: SDR
image above, HDR simulation below
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.hitachikokusai.com/ http://www.hitachikokusai.com/ http://www.hitachikokusai.com/ http://www.hitachikokusai.com/
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - July 2017
