It’s by a sunny morning that the IBC 2012 exhibition did open this morning. After an early uninspiring conference session on “second screen” potential revenue, I decided to begin the visit of a few Halls.

IBC is bigger than ever this year with a couple of temporary halls that are setup outside. I did a quick tour of four of the 13 halls and a few things got my attention:

-DSLR: I am impressed of the evolution of Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras that have been evolving from still camera to support full HD. There not yet at an equal level to the purpose build video camera on things like 4K resolution or full studio integration but it’s clearly going in that direction.

-OLED Broadcast monitors: Sony has now three level of high quality OLED monitors. The lower level is the so called “Professional” level the other two are “Broadcast” but the high grade is geared towards digital cinematography. They are all quite impressive. It’s still limited in site, do not support stereo 3D or 4K but those are the best ones available currently for quality and colour control.

-The amount of suppliers of hardware for camera and shooting in general: While the industry is consolidating in many area, it seems that there is no end in the number of small vendors that create very specialized hardware for production. Camera stabilizers, robots, rail system, grip equipment, lights… I am not sure how the market support all those but the entry point is lower than other area so that might be part of the explanation.

-The EBU was doing a presentation of compression results with 4K content using the new HEVC codec. It was impressive even if the compression show clearly on the high frequencies details. Still 4K at 6 to 12 Mbps is quite impressive.