High-definition TV may still be far from the norm in many countries, but that isn’t stopping engineers at Japan’s public broadcaster from pushing ahead with development of Super Hi-Vision, a system they hope will eventually replace HDTV. Last week engineers at NHK’s (Nippon Hoso Kyokai) Science and Technical Research Laboratories showed off their most recent work on the technology.

A Super Hi-Vision (SHV) picture is made up of 4,320 horizontal picture lines and 7,680 vertical lines. That’s four times the horizontal and vertical resolution of current HDTV or, put another way, a single Super Hi-Vision image is equivalent to 16 tiled HDTV screens.

In the year since it was last demonstrated, the company has developed an image sensor for use in TV cameras that can shoot an entire SHV screen.

Until now the sensors in NHK’s prototype SHV camera had half the resolution of an SHV image. Three were used, one each for red, blue and green, and an extra green sensor was added to effectively double the resolution possible and match that of SHV.