Technology

Quality of the system is such a massive dependency here, I can well believe that someone watching old reruns from a shitty streaming service that is upscaled to 1080p or 4k by their TV they purchased from the supermarket with coupons collected from their breakfast cereal is going to struggle to tell the difference.

Likewise if you fed the TVs with a high end 4k blu ray player and any blu ray considered reference such as Interstellar, you are still going to struggle to tell the difference, even with a more midrange TV unless the TVs get comically large for the viewing distance so that the 1080p screen starts to look pixelated.

I think very few people would expect their old wired apple earphones they got free with their iphone 4 would expect amazing sound from them, yet people seem to be ignoring the same for cheap TVs. I am not advocating for ultra high end audio/videophile nonsense with systems costing 10s of thousands, just that quite large and noticeable gains are available much lower down the scale.

Depending what you watch and how you watch it, good quality HDR for the right content is an absolute home run for difference between standard 1080p and 4k HDR if your TV can do true black. Shit TVs do HDR shitterly, its just not comparable to a decent TV and source. Its like playing high rez loss less audio on those old apple wired earphones vs. playing low bitrate MP3s.

Really depends on the size of the screen, the viewing distance, and your age/eye condition. For more people 720 or 1080 is just fine. With 4k, you will get some better detail on the fabric on clothes and environments, but not a huge difference.

8k is gonna be a huge waste and will fail.

Black and white antennae TV's from the 1950's was clearer than a lot of TV's today, but they weighed 600 kilograms. Nowadays I buy cheap, small TV's and let my brain fill in the empty spaces like it's supposed to. /s

If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish. The scientists made it crystal clear: once your setup hits that threshold, any further increase in pixel count, like moving from 4K to an 8K model of the same size and distance, hits the law of diminishing returns because your eye simply can't detect the added detail. 

I commend them on their study of human eye "pixels-per-degree" perception resolution limit, but there are some caveats to the article title and their findings.

First of all, nobody recommends a 44-inch TV for 2.5 metres, I watch from the same distance and I think the minimum recommended 4k TV size for that distance was 55 inches.

Second, I'm not sure many QHD TVs are being offered, market mostly offers 4k or 1080p TVs, QHDs would be a small percentage.

And QHDs are already pretty noticable quality jump over 1080p, I've noticed on my gaming rig. So basically if you do the jump from 1080p to 4K, and watch 4k quality content, from the right distance - most people are absolutely gonna notice that quality difference.

For 8Ks I don't know, you probably do get into diminishing returns there unless you have a wall-sized TV or watch it from very close.

But yeah, clickbaity titled article, mostly.

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.

Anecdotally at average viewing distances on my 55" TV I can't really tell a difference. If I had an enormous TV maybe I would be able to tell. 1080 > 2160 is for sure not the leap 720 > 1080, or 480 > 720 was in the average environment that's for sure.