The PHABRIX Qx At InterBEE

The march to 4K/8K and 12 Gbps has begun. In fact if you were at InterBEE as PHABRIX was in November this year, one thing that stood out very clearly was the tremendous amount of interest in 4K and 8K, driven by the Olympic decision by NHK.

What was equally as illuminating was the small, almost invisible presence of IP solutions. In fact HDR as a technology seemed to feature more.

NAB and IBC 2015 were quite different in comparison. At both the American NAB and European IBC shows there was as much interest in file based and IP infrastructures as there was for UHDTV – possibly more for IP. It just acknowledges that you can't treat all markets the same in the broadcast industry – particularly Japan.

PHABRIX has a history of being very successful in this traditionally closed market. Japanese broadcast manufacturing companies prefer to deal almost exclusively with fellow Japanese companies. The only way to break this purchasing habit is to have something truly unique to offer which occurred for PHABRIX in 2009 when we released our Sx hand held range in Japan. The innovation encompassed in the Sx transcended any worries about adopting 'other' outside technologies – clearly this was 'best in class' and unique in a world that had not seen a hand held combined generator, analyzer and monitoring solution along with support for SD-SDI, HD-SDI and the new 3G-SDI standard.

Most were only testing HD at this time so 3G-SDI was definitely an 'out there' format – but it wasn't a problem as the 3G-SDI was bundled for free. This combination was at once both transforming and at a price that made the products unbeatable. Where am I going with this? At InterBEE 2015 PHABRIX found itself in a similar situation. Unique technology supporting yet more new standards – but these new formats have eye watering bit rates.

At InterBEE we were exhibiting our new PHABRIX Qx for 4K/8K UHDTV test and measurement instrument and the product found a ready audience amongst the very big technology companies who visited our stand to see the product in operation. In fact we quite quickly had a steady stream of exhibitors visiting the stand. Gone was any of the uncertainty in what technology to invest in as experienced in the US and European markets – (was it SDI or IP?) – for all these manufacturers were focussed on developing 12Gbps solutions – and developing them quickly. Not that the Qx doesn't technologically support IP networks as well as 12Gbps, the emphasis at this show was on SDI.

For those who made their way to the stand, the majority of our time was spent demonstrating the 12 Gbps eye and jitter technology on the Qx – particularly our unique 12Gbps real time multi rate eye technology capable of showing rise time and fall time – a must for those having to comply with SMPTE specification. Having a combined generator and analyzer as part of the package was also a must – particularly given the fact that both functions needed to be 'on' at the same time to provide a closed loop testing environment. It also helped that we have a particularly 'clean' generator on the Qx. Interestingly MACOM had a Qx in their demonstration suite held off the show floor in one of the few hotels in the Chiba region of Japan. They too were pleasantly surprised by the level of interest in 12Gbps.

Well to end, there was a lot of new technology on show, especially drones etc, but it was the screenless 3D projection display on the NHK stand that made me smile with delight as I wafted my hand through the images hanging in space. Pure delight.

www.phabrix.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online.

(JP)