This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Heh, I'm getting back to physical media, and this big 4K TV is literally the first time ever where I've actually constantly noticed that DVDs might get a bit pixely.
(And even so, I usually blame not so great digitisation. Some transfers of old obscure titles were really sloppy, you really didn't need a great TV to see the problems. Original was a black and white movie, the DVD was a bunch of grey mush.)
You know what would sell like hot cakes? A dumb TV with Dolby Vision support. I went down the rabbit hole of finding a large HDR monitor and adapters to trick end devices to output player-led Dolby Vision to a HDR monitors, because I don't need my TV to have a complete OS with streaming services and adverts integrated.
In the end I couldn't find anything that didn't have drawbacks. It's something that could easily exist but there are no manufacturers bold enough to implement it.
Streaming tech moves so fast, I want to add it to my TV through hardware like a fire stick, not to become dependent on the TV manufacturer putting out updates until it's 'Out-of-support'.
I went with a TV and disabled as much of the junk as I could with a service remote and just never connected it to the internet, but jumping through these hoops seems so silly.
I watch 576i DVDs on a 24" 1366x768 TV and I don't mind because I sit reasonably far.
Study Boldly Claims 4K And 8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes, But Is It True?
The rare exception to Betteridge's Law.
But yeah, this matches my experience. I can tell the difference between 1080 and 4k from my couch if I work at it, but not enough to impact my enjoyment of what I'm watching, and definitely not as much as the difference HDR makes.
Even at computer monitor distance, running a 4k monitor at 1440 with high pixel density is probably going to be a better experience than wrenching every single pixel you can get out of it. Framerate is better than resolution for gaming, for the most part.
This is pretty obvious due to how they had to add HDR at the same time to sell it. The HDR was a real progression, but they wouldn’t get to sell you higher res Blu-ray formats and streaming packages with just that.
simply incorrect. in some circumstances sure 1080p is sufficient, but if the tv is big, close, or both. then 4k is a definite and noticeable improvement.
4k looks sharper as long as the actual content is real 4k, even from afar.
So completely correct as the point you are trying to make is the point the study focuses on (definition per viewed angle)
Ok, but then 2k would usually do.
Yeah tell that to my sister, who wants 4k for her laptop simply because she's heard 4k is better 4 times 1080p, she's buying a 13 inch.
Small numbers are just not sufficient for some people. I know if I send this article to her, I'll be questioned "why do you not want me to see happy?". So instead I just watch my nephews collage fund contribution shrink.
Sorry it became a rant of family tech guy.
Eh, let her for a few weeks, but show her how to switch resolution.
I thought this was known. I personally never see a difference between 1080p and 4K, and its great cuz it saves me money :)
I didn’t get why HD tv was relevant at all. I really did not understand that for a couple years.
Then I got glasses.
I suspect 4k matters for screens of a certain size or if you sit really close, but most of us don’t so it doesn’t matter.
The study used a 44 inch TV at 2.5m. The most commonly used calculator for minimum TV to distance says that at 2.5m the TV should be a least 60 inches.
My own informal tests at home with a 65 inch TV looking at 1080 versus 4K Remux of the same movie seems to go along with the distance calculator. At the appropriate distance or nearer I can see a difference if I am viewing critically (as opposed to casually). Beyond a certain distance the difference is not apparent.
Exactly. This title is just clickbait.
The actual study's title is "Resolution limit of the eye — how many pixels can we see?".
Exactly why big box stores force you to look at TVs in narrow aisles, not at typical distances at home. They also adjust pictures on highest margin models properly.
Me getting 480p videos for my video projector : "Oh... no really?" ¯\(ツ)/¯
PS: FWIW I do have a Vision Pro (for work, I didn't pay for it personally) so I technically could enjoy high res content... but honestly I can't bother using this to watch videos. I'm fine with just my desktop screen or video projector. I just don't get the high res.
Honestly after using the steam deck (800p) I'm starting to wonder if res matters that much. Like I can definitely see the difference, but it's not that big a deal? All I feel like I got out of my 4k monitor is lower frame rates.
Pixel density is what makes content appear sharp rather than raw resolution. 800p on a 7" screen is plenty, if you think about it a 50" 1080p TV is almost 10x the size with a 25% increase in resolution
Kind of a tangent, but properly encoded 1080p video with a decent bitrate actually looks pretty damn good.
A big problem is that we've gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube's 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.
This. The visual difference of good vs bad 1080p is bigger than between good 1080p and good 4k. I will die on this hill. And Youtube's 1080p is garbage on purpose so they get you to buy premium to unlock good 1080p. Assholes
The 1080p for premium users is garbage too. Youtube's video quality in general is shockingly poor. If there is even a slight amount of noisy movement on screen (foliage, confetti, rain, snow, etc) the the video can literally become unwatchable.
Yeah I'd way rather have higher bitrate 1080 than 4k. Seeing striping in big dark or light spots on the screen is infuriating
I was wondering when we’d get to the snake oil portion of the video hobby that audiophiles have been suffering. 8k vs. 4k is the new lossy vs. lossless argument.
Just recently, on this site, someone tried to tell me that there was no audible difference between 128kbps and 360kbps mp3. Insane.
i'd rather have proper 4k.
Stremio
For most streaming? Yeah.
Give me a good 4k Blu-ray though. High bitrate 4k
I can still find 480p videos from when YouTube first started that rival the quality of the compressed crap “1080p” we get from YouTube today. It’s outrageous.
4k is way better than 1080p, it's not even a question. You can see that shit from a mile away. 8k is only better if your TV is comically large.
I think you overestimate the quality of many humans' eyes. Many people walk around with slightly bad vision no problem. Many older folks have bad vision even corrected. I cannot distinguish between 1080 and 4k in the majority of circumstances. Stick me in front of a computer and I can notice, but tvs and computers are at wildly different distances.
i suspect screen size would make the difference. you won't notice 4K or 8K on small screens.
It's the ratio of screen size to distance from the screen. But typically you sit further from larger screens, so there's an optimization problem in there somewhere.
so there's an optimization problem in there somewhere
The optimization problem is actually the point of the study, encoded as PPD, which represents the density of a display's pixel per degree of your eye's field of vision. It says that any more than 53-94 PPD is imperceptible to most. You can see if your display makes the cutoff if you have the viewing distance and screen size here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/projects/display_calc/
Highly depends on screen size and viewing distance, but nothing reasonable for a normal home probably ever needs more than 8k for a high end setup, and 4K for most cases.
Contrast ratio/HDR and per-pixel backlighting type technology is where the real magic is happening.
Hard disagree. 4K is stunning, especially Samsung’s Neo-QLED. I cannot yet tell a difference between 4K and 8K, though.
You would need a 150+ inch screen for 8K to make any difference. 8K is pretty much dead in the water considering DVDs outsell 4K Blu-Rays and 8K media is pretty much unavailable and 8K gaming being basically impossible. Even the TV manufacturers are phasing out their 8K devices since no one is buying them.
I can pretty confidently say that 4k is noticeable if you're sitting close to a big tv. I don't know that 8k would ever really be noticeable, unless the screen is strapped to your face, a la VR. For most cases, 1080p is fine, and there are other factors that start to matter way more than resolution after HD. Bit-rate, compression type, dynamic range, etc.
8K would probably be really good for large computer monitors, due to viewing distances. It would be really taxing on the hardware if you were using it for gaming, but reasonable for tasks that aren't graphically intense.
Computer monitors (for productivity tasks) are a little different though in that you are looking at section of the screen rather than the screen as a whole as one might with video. So having extra screen real estate can be rather valuable.
Seriously, articles like this are just clickbait.
They also ignore all sorts of usecases.
Like for a desktop monitor, 4k is extremely noticeable vs even 1440P or 1080P/2k
Unless you're sitting very far away, the sharpness of text and therefore amount of readable information you can fit on the screen changes dramatically.
This is so much bullshit. 4K does make a difference, specially if playing console games on a large TV (65" and up).
Console games that all run at <720p getting upscaled to hell and back. We have come so far since the PS3 where games ran at <720p, but without upscaling. lol
Shhh – the ISPs need a reason to sell bigger data plans. Please think of the ISPs…
Except everyone uses crap bit rates and compression on their streaming content and it really doesn’t look that much better than 1080p. UHD Blu Rays tho are a totally different story, absolutely outclassing lower res content.
Sure but, hear me out, imagine having most of your project sourcecode on the screen at the same time without having to line-wrap.
