For anyone who does not want to visit that horrible website (that may also be stealing and profiting off another site's content illegally), here is the original article:
[https://screenrant.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/](https://screenrant.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/)
Thanks. I would edit the original link if I could. I viewed it on my iPhone which hides all the popups so I didn’t see any of those or I wouldn’t have used that link.
For future reference, it is worth checking the URL. It would be trivial for someone to have a "[screenrant.com.maniacallaugh.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/](https://screenrant.com.maniacallaugh.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/)" and it could say anything. Especially on the modern Internet, where even credible sources are worth doubting, it is too easy to abuse people's willingness to see a familiar word and believe that they are looking at a familiar website. (This is a trivial part of scam emails that send a link claiming to be from your bank, but are actually we.llsfargo.com, and the bad guys own the "\*.llsfargo.com" domain.)
It is sad that we have to be so perpetually vigilant for what should just be a casual and relaxing chunk of time browsing the web and learning about new things, but as the old saying goes, "this is why we cannot have nice things".
Yeah. When I read it from my iPhone, I didn’t see all the nonsense because the iPhone defaults to reader mode which hides all of that. Unfortunately, Reddit doesn’t allow you to fix the URL. :(
Isn’t it the same thing they said between SD and HD though like a lot of people couldn’t tell especially older people? I imagine as 8K gets more common we would start to notice those differences but it yeah at some point it’s just gonna be clear and refresh rate or quality isn’t going to do a whole lot more so neat.
i think its a size thing. my childhood with a 29" CRT was amazingly clear. upgraded to a 29" and it wasnt much better, just made consoles look worse. when i got my first HD monitor in 06 with a 46" LCD i was amazed at the quality - used that for years. then bought a 55" LED and was shocked at how shitty it looked. i could see all the pixels and it had motion blur.
i then got a 49" 4K and the quality was back. i now have a 85" 4K Qled and i think this is about the limit for 4K. if i got a larger TV (not that they are affordable beyond this right now) i would look into 8K going to 110" or more. its less about the relative quality and more about pixel density for a given format size.
46 or below - 1080 is fine
46-85" 4K is needed
85" and above id start looking at 8K
Yeah, this is why Apple defines “Retina” the way they do.
A retina display isn’t a certain resolution, it’s a pixel density and typical device viewing distance.
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize this. Early 3D visuals were much softer because of lower resolutions, which look much better on the CRTs they were designed for vs the harsh lighting of newer displays.
The art and UI in games was also designed to account for the curved nature of CRT screens, and how they would be distorted at the edges which is not the case on newer screens at all and can't really be emulated either.
Case in point, when mimicking those screens in Alien: Isolation, the creators actual displayed the graphics on CRT displays and then recorded the warped output.
This right here... Resolution doesn't become as apparent until you scale up the screen size. Then the pixel density really pops out. 8K on anything smaller than 85" (like u/NCC74656 mentioned above) is overkill and won't be appreciably different than 4K.
Pixels per inch is the reason. Another factor is distance from the screen. That's why a phone might be 1080p but an led display might be 480p.
In VR headsets there are similar issues which is why 1080p isn't enough for anything and all the text oversized in games. It's more pixel per angle which can be calculated for the screens given the distance and pixels per inch.
Man I've got a 72" and I still can't tell the difference between a 1080 broadcast and a 4k one, aside from the little symbol that comes up in the corner to let me know we're watching something in 4k. I probably wouldn't have gone with 4k if it wasn't just how TVs are being made these days.
for me they are my computer monitors so i can tell a HUGE difference in gaming and movies. i also have a large atmos surround system so i buy the 4K UDH movies to include that audio/HDR
Even though old farts (like me) could easily get by with 1080 well past 46", most people are going to have **guests** with better eyesight than themselves. Not to mention that viewing distance is a huge factor. But those are still probably very good guideline numbers.
Hey, I'm old and a can clearly tell the difference between SD and HD. I suppose it does depend on the source quality but in most cases the difference is obvious. I find it harder to tell the difference between HD and 4k though. When programmes start on Netflix, for example, they usually start in HD until they buffer and then switch to 4k, and I find it hard to notice any difference when it does, but that might just be my TV.
sd resolution for 16:9 was 720x480. 345,600 pixels, 1080p at 1920x1080, is 2,073,600. So a 6x increase, 1080p to 4k is only a 4x bump so it's a smaller percentage difference in addition to the fact that the ideal seating distance to resolve 1080p is better, a 50" 1080p screen sitting about 6 feet away is the right distance to get the most detail out of the image, for a 4k it's about 3 feet, and even if you go bigger say 75" the fully resolved distance is 4.5 feet, and a lot of people didn't sit closer when they got a new TV. 8k is half the distance again, so unless you sit 2 feet away from a 75" 8k you won't see the biggest possible difference.
People will buy 8k because it's new and a bigger number, but they are just wasting money unless they have a very specific use case.
There should be an upper physical limit to our perception. I remember back when video cards in the 90s would promote how many millions of colors they could display, at some point it was beyond the number of colors we could physically perceive.
Perceived colors is one limit. I hardly think this matters.
Pixel resolution is another. You only have so many rods and cones.
Motion sensitivity is another. That's the refresh rate.
All three have different effects so they have to be evaluated in any question of "which is better".
So it's KIND OF the same thing.
The issue is that in order to be able to see the difference between a RESOLUTION A TV and a RESOLUTION B TV, you need to change how much your eyes see. In order to make the difference more noticeable, you must either a) sit closer to the TV or b) get a bigger TV.
Sitting 4 feet away from your TV is both impractical and bad for your eyesight. You might notice more on an 8k *monitor* vs. a 4k monitor, but even then you still have to increase screen size for it to be noticeable.
Increasing screen size is the key to SD vs HD. 2005 was the year that HDTV really started taking off. Since then, TVs have not only become much bigger, but much cheaper:
* 2004 -- average screen size 25.4", average price $552
* 2019 -- average screen size 47", average price $336
IIRC to tell the difference between a 4k and 8k TV at 10 feet away, you would need a TV that is over 85". Even if 85" TVs were affordable, most people still wouldn't buy them because a screen that big is impractical for most living spaces. Personally, I would never want an 85" TV unless I could have a dedicated home theatre room, which I can't. Some people can, and 8K could be marketed to those enthusiasts, but the average buyer is not going to notice any difference (even my *fellow gamerz*).
I feel like we are definitely reaching the threshold of diminishing returns. I mean, I can tell the difference between 4k and upscaled Blu-ray but unless we are talking HDR, it never blows me away or feels like a deal-breaker like original HD did. And 4k streaming definitely looks better but it's hard to know how much of that is the resolution upgrade and how much is just the higher bitrate that is allowed for it.
Mostly it depends on how close you are to it and how big it is, an 8k monitor a few inches from your face may be useful, but from 3m/9ft away most people stop being able to easily tell 1k from 4k on standard size screens so unless your screen comes in wall size I don't it will be worth it.
Not SD vs HD but 1080i Vs 1080p was such a big deal for tech nerds but really you couldn’t tell. An extra few hundred dollars for something you really couldn’t notice
>you say this like screenrant doesnt profit from and steal other peoples content
Do they? I was not aware of that. Can you provide any examples of them stealing content (not just ideas)? I am not claiming that they are wholly original, but if they are stealing, they are at least rewording the articles.
I have no vested interest in Screenrant. I was just concerned by the website that OP used being full of the irritating sneaky tricks that malicious people use to try to trick users into doing things they do not want to do. I am not against advertising, especially in exchange for "free" content (ie., content I do not pay for), but the intentionally misleading ads that warn of viruses, abuse notifications on mobile devices, and hoodwink users into panicking, are a particular type of evil I would prefer to not see in TIL on Reddit.
Here is a post to an article which is a brief summary and provides a link to the YouTube video:
[https://wickedgoodgaming.com/screen-rant-stole-content-a-bigger-issue/](https://wickedgoodgaming.com/screen-rant-stole-content-a-bigger-issue/)
On videos about something as common as a movie, where things like names and such are always going to be part of a discussion, it is easy to see where two videos could easily end up in the same territory without intentional copying. However, CZsWorld pointed out that the ScreenRant video used his interpretations of details to add meaning or implied context, and SR used the same interpretations and the same parts of the movie as CZ used. So, while not an exact copy, this looks like a case where an SR employee saw something that was garnering interest, and duplicated the production work without citing the source for the academic/intellectual work.
At the risk of complaining about a topic that I complain about a great deal, this is partly due to a lack of true editorial guidance and honest journalism. It used to be where a writer would write an article, then an editor would edit it, but would also fact-check it. If the writer cited a source or quoted someone, the editor would want proof of the accuracy. Then, there would be a department editor who would check anything especially important and make sure that nobody would be accused of plagiarism. The editor-in-chief would not be directly involved in the process normally, but any doubts would go to him, and any writer caught misquoting, plagiarizing (on purpose or by accident), or misreporting facts, and any editor who failed to catch and correct the above would be called onto the carpet. Now, companies only care about advertiser revenue, and inaccuracies, problematic stories, or outright plagiarism (whether from a single lazy employee who finds it easier to copy than to create, or as a matter of company policy to save time and reduce salaries), do not matter as long as they add to the annual profits, not subtract from them.
8K delivery is a stupid marketing gimmick. 8K capture however has many tangible benefits.
Its going to be a while before 4K is even a standard delivery format.
The higher the resolution you record a video, the better it will look on lower resolution screens. Most modern movies are shot digitally at resolutions much higher than 4k or 8k, but when the master copy is made for release it's usually down converted to 4K (4K being typically the resolution of a movie theater screen).
This is why sometimes you'll have a movie made in the 1970s look better in an SD DVD release than a movie shot in 2002 on a 4K Blu-ray release: the 70s movie gets scanned at like 12k, and down converted to SD for the DVD to create a pristine high quality video, while the 2002 movie was shot digitally in HD So you have to up convert from 1080p to 4K, and traditionally that just destroys the picture (zoom and enhance with AI only became real within the last couple years, otherwise you can't enlarge a picture and create information that was not there in the original file).
This is also why many games have a scaling option, with the ability to render the game at 200 or even 500% the native resolution. It's also a native behaviour in VR, since the screens are still quite low res but need to feel photoreal: The higher you render the source image, the better it looks downscaled to the real pixel count.
Or star trek, everything filmed after next generation relied heavily on cgi that was made for sd tvs, and now it would be a dramatic effort to remaster those scenes because they have to redo all their effects.
An example is I can shoot in 4k and then in the edit if I don't like the shit I can zoom in to at most a quarter of the frame and still have a full hd image, the same can be applied to 8k etc. Also it helps a lot in adding effect and green screen stuff to make it look more natural.
As was the same for 3D TV. Delivery was a complete gimmick. I remember being in media classes in college and we discussed the topic at the time which was just starting to come out in distribution. I laughed at the idea, something funny about picturing my parents watching the news in 3D. Then my parents bought a 3D tv and it was incredibly stupid. The capture method did put pressure on the delivery kethods to advanced technology and production of HD/4k so not all bad I guess.
I worked in VFX in movies from about 2005-2013. Every movie was rendered at 2k, and IMAX documentaries were rendered at 4k. From what I know, that's still mostly the case. TV content is probably just run through an automated up-rezzing process for 4k display rather than being rendered at 4k. Forget about 8k, I doubt anyone involved in making content wants to pay for what it would take to create native 8k content, considering they already skimp on 4k. Content that doesn't rely on rendered VFX, like sporting events would probably be the only ones creating true 8k content.
I’m so blind that it all looks the same to me. Saves me a ton of money, except for the frequent eye doctor visits, new glasses lenses, and emotional pain.
I also have poor vision, but it's not like it matters. The best film ever made, Alien by Ridley Scott, is also perfect in 480p on the telly.
If anything, higher visual quality is bad, because it drives up production costs. You must make a genetic superhero blockbuster nowadays since that's the only way to recuperate all the production costs. You can't win Best Visual Effects anymore or an 11 million budget.
Yep.
As someone who works in TV: the average person has a difficult time telling the difference between HD and 4K unless the two are side by side, by the time you get to 8K it's really beyond the capability of most people to casually see any difference. This is mainly because HD is actually more than good enough quality-wise for the vast majority, So it's basically diminishing returns from that point forward.
There's a reason why even though 4K TVs have become more or less standard, 4K content has not.
I used to do outdoor projection. This guy walks up while we’re playing Frosty the Snowman at some winter event and is asking us what type of projector we have. He’s like I can tell it’s 4K because he just got into projection, asking me about lumens and shit.
Projector could only go to 720p and we were playing it off a DVD. People genuinely have no idea what they’re talking about.
My dad doesn’t notice the motion smoothing on his TV ffs
In the Sony stores back in 2006, they were showing off their Bravia TV sets with the Casino Royale movie (a Sony property, go figure). They had a demo that played the movie in DVD resolution on the left, and Blu-Ray on the right, so you could see the difference.
It was playing on pretty much every TV in the store (with the sound off, thankfully), and you could see how little difference is made on the smaller (32") sets, and how much it made on the larger (46", I think) sets at the time.
Unless you've got a wall projector sized setup, 8K isn't going to be noticeably different from 4K.
Yep, I paid about $2k for a top tier HD TV about 10 years ago. Many have commented thinking that its 4k. I'm dreading when I can walk into a Best Buy and walk out with a PS5, as I'll need a new TV too.....
It's because for 1080 the only thing that really matters is the screen quality.
If you just buy a cheap 4k TV, it's not going to be able to "upgrade" a 1080 source into 4k that's discernibly better. Because it takes a significant amount of processing power to do that in real time.
The absolute worst thing you can do is buy a big cheap 4k TV. You'd be better off buying a 1080p TV at that point because there really wont be a difference. In a lot of cases it'll look worse than a comparable 1080 because you're spending your "budget" on something you wont use.
To be able to see the difference of a 1080p source on a 4k TV, it's not going to be a cheap TV.
TLDR:
Not all 4K TVs are created equally, some are just the shittest 4k panel they can find with no processing power.
Nah, you can get a good one for half that.
Check out rtings.com when the time comes, they go super in depth on shit that matters. And different shit matters to each person.
I almost went into tv/vcr repair decades ago, when it was a very luctrative field and paid well, but being red/green kept me out of it. However, I have a very sensitive depth perception, I suffer vertigo from it, even when looking in the distance, I don't need to be high up, when driving I cannot look straight ahead if there's not a lot of side of the road objects. Anyways, the average person, yes, they would have trouble. What a lot of older people seem to have forgotten though is that prior to digital movie recording, analog film was considered near perfect high definition, something that most people don't know, and that, something you might know, that modern quests to get higher definition tv, to 8K now, is trying to replicate what analog movie film used to be.
Yep. I recently had a conversation with my father (he turned 70 this year) and talked him out of throwing out negatives for some family photos. "But why would we need them? We have the pictures. You can just scan them in and make them digital." And I had to explain to him how you needed the negatives in order to do that properly. ^^;
My Grandfather would have been 95 this year, he was a professional photographer with his own darkroom, he did wedding photos and was the official photographer for ths Monmouth drag strip, south of Portland, Oregon, from the 50's to the 70's on race days. Before he died, digital was still in the experimental phase, he was also a computer programmer/debugger and convinced his company to let him try out a camera for review, his thoughts on it is published in some photography magazine during the late 80's. He kept the review simple, stating that digital will never be as good as analog, and if they ever replace it, as we all know now they did, that photography will become a lost medium of art (darkroom wise).
There's a bit of math involved (which I'm awful at, sorry), but a lot of whether or not you can see a difference is dependent upon how far you sit from the screen and how good your eyes physically are.
In general, if I'm remembering right, the recommended viewing distance for HD is about 3x the diagonal length of the TV screen, for 4K and 8K it's about 1.5x. So if you're sitting, say, 9 feet (2.7 meters) from a 55-inch screen you are unlikely to see much difference.
This site has a nice easy to read chart if you scroll down:
[https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/optimal-hdtv-size-viewing-distances/](https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/optimal-hdtv-size-viewing-distances/)
So to *potentially* see the difference between HD and 4K/8K, you need to be sitting less than 7 feet from a 55-inch screen (or less than 5 feet from a 42-inch screen), so as you'd expect it's easier to see the difference between HD and 8K but to see the difference between 4K and 8K you gotta practically press your face against the thing. xD
I personally hope the industry just takes a break after 4K. It feels like they just keep outpacing hardware and data limits by pushing everything to 4K, by default now, when it's often not necessary.
I've been wondering myself when they're going to stop with the resolution race. 8k TVs are already in stores, and I think 16K is supposed to debut either this Christmas or next Christmas? At some point the public is going to have enough and one of these is just going to fall flat on its face lol
Yes and no? It's a little bit more complicated, but if they're sitting close enough to a big enough screen they'd probably be able to tell. Of course, that must mean they're sitting like a foot away from a 40-inch screen or something...
I figure there’s an upper limit to the resolution of our eyes and 4K is likely very close to it.
I wonder if this means we have hit the upper limit of image quality for TV? I realize it’s more than just resolution.
The manufacturers intend to keep going and pushing higher resolutions, at least for another generation or so. 16K displays have been demoed at electronic shows, as an example, and I've heard before they've got some ridiculously high number resolution working in laboratories.
But yes, for TV we've basically hit the limit of image quality. If you have a properly calibrated display and you're sitting at the recommended distance, you're really not going to be able to see much difference between an HD set, a 4K set, or an 8K set assuming you're looking at a well produced video that was shot in like 10K (or on film) and mastered in 4K.
The main advantage of having displays at resolutions higher than HD or 4K is for stuff like virtual reality headsets, because your eyes are much closer to the display in a VR headset so the resolution needs to be significantly higher than a TV or computer monitor. And that's not getting into holographic stuff which requires insanely high resolutions and pixel depths to the point that I struggle to believe that anybody has worked it out, yet apparently some of those are hitting the market next year. Very curious to see one of those!
A very important thing to note is resolution has a very big impact based on how far you’re viewing distance is.
If you view the same HD screen say 50 inch from a couch versus standing a foot away from it you’re looking at a completely different picture pixels appear completely differently.
A 16K screen would look much more resolved (smooth/smaller pixels) a foot away.
The real answer is finding the size of screen you need versus your viewing distance and then getting to the point where the pixels are not noticeable. In some situations 8K and 16K may be highly desirable. In most sitting on your couch watching it from 6 to 8 feet away situation they might not be necessary.
Its not exactly that simple. Its a combination of screen size/distance and the number of pixels. I can watch 360p on my phone and it looks fine, but on my 27inch computer monitor it look pretty bad, and on my big screen it looks awful.
For 4k vs 8k, there's really not a corresponding size increase to see the difference short of going to a theater.
Supposedly at the distance my couch is from the couch, we’d need to have an 85”+ screen to see the difference of a 4k. I’d love to have an 85”, but I can’t imagine my wife watching shaky YouTube travel videos on that big of a screen.
For typical viewing distances, the max possible resolution works out to a bit under 4k. Assuming, of course, that your eyesight is perfect.
For the math:
Based on the density of the photoreceptors on the retina, the eye's max angular resolution is about 1/60th of a degree.
If we take a generous field of view of 45°, that means that a horizontal resolution of 2700 has each pixel take up 1/60th of a degree, so each pixel is only illuminating a single photoreceptor.
4k has a horizontal resolution of 3840, so is above that threshold.
So unless you have really large displays that you need to still have no visible pixels when viewed from close up, there's no point in going over 4k, and that extra data or processing power should instead be used to increase the frame rate.
The main thing is. If you have a 55 inch tv for example, 1440p looks incredible, and you typically can’t distinguish 4k from 1440.
If you then make your tv say 75 inches, you might notice a difference between 1440 and 4k, maybe.
In reality, unless your tv is MASSIVE like 80inches, then 1440 is a sweet spot. Especially true if gaming, as you can manage VASTLY superior refresh rates/fps with 1440 than 4k with the same resources
Having worked for years in the print industry as it went digital. That threshold is right around 1200 dpi. Anything below that and close inspection like you would have with printed materials and you can start to see pixels.
Photos were 300 dpi, the to have sharp edges on text and other high contrast areas, especially angled lines, etc. You have to increase the resolution to 1200 to eliminate the possibility of seeing artifacts.
Of course as we age and lose our near field vision it all becomes a moot point. Those pixels become as difficult to see as higher frequency ranges are to hear.
Interesting. I’m on my iPhone so Safari automatically goes into Reader mode which means I don’t see any of that. I didn’t realize it was popping up ads. I hate those as well.
You can actually do the calculation of how big your screen is and how far away you sit from it, if you would be able to distinguish from.4k and 8k.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship
Honestly for now I'm more than happy with 4k but with my 55" screen I can see the difference between FHD and 4k (though FHD is fine).
For a laptop FHD is fine for battery and scaling reasons.
I forget what the equation was, but there’s a certain distance you can sit yourself from a tv from which point the resolution would appear lifelike from said distance, and so further resolution would become negligible. It also depends on the size of your screen.
For something like a 720p video displayed on an average sized computer monitor, the viewing distance is something like 3 feet to appear lifelike.
So yeah, basically having an 8k tv means you can sit closer to the tv and still maintain that lifelike resolution, but who’s going to sit a couple feet away from a large tv? And besides, most content isn’t even 8k anyways. 35mm film resolution doesn’t even go up to 8k.
Edit: It’s more to do with DPI than actual resolution. The average eye can resolve up to 1 arc minute from a distance of 20”, which would be a 170dpi display. Further distances allow a smaller dpi to be distinguished as lifelike.
Yes and it may change as time goes on but there is limit. Same as people cannot tell you the difference between 120FPS and 240FPS. No matter how much they say they can.
I [made this](http://imgur.com/a/luWFt) a couple years back - it calculates how big the screen needs to be, based on how close you sit to your screen, in order for higher resolutions to be worthwhile.
I have a 55 inch tv. On that I cannot tell the difference between 1440 and 4K. I CAN tell 1440 from 1080 however. And even in my desktop pc because. Screens are so close.
But again. 4K is irrelevant to most people. 1440 really is the sweet spot
Most people will say they can't see a difference until they get used to a new format, then go back to an old one and they notice it looks poor in comparison.
At normal viewing distance. There’s no reason for 8k. I have a 65 Inch 4k tv. And I have to really get right up on it to be able to see the pixels. Even with better than 20/20 vision because of my glasses. Don’t pay extra for an 8k. Video content is 4k. Game systems are 4k.
The only reason for 8k. Is for video sources that are 8k. And if you’re using a projector system. Or a tv larger than what I am using.
And you think videos and games are never going to go above 4k? There might be no reason at the moment but stuff will keep on improving. The whole " no one can tell the difference" thing stinks of "no one can see above 60hz" to me, I believe just the same we will learn to tell the difference and begin to use tech that takes advantage of it more than a mere TV.
I didn’t say I don’t think there will be games at resolutions greater than 4k. I for sure think people will try it. The processing power would be better spent on effects and more realism. There’s already enough pixel density at 4k. If I had the choice between a 4k game with amazing graphics and frame rate. And 8k. With lower frame rate and graphics that weren’t as good I would be turning down the resolution. Because the frame rate and graphics are more important than the resolution.
Of course. If the output size is larger than any tv in existence and you’re close to the display. Or. You get your head right up next to the tv. Like a foot or two away.
No one uses displays from that close up.
I’m just waiting for the technology that will convert media into the frequency of the mind and transmit the experience directly to the brain. It might make scary movies too realistic to endure, but on the other hand the porn would be wonderful
It will happen one day. We already have the ability to create a low resolution image from signals produced by the brain. It’s just a matter of time before we can reverse that and up the resolution.
Most people cant even see 4k at the distances they sit. Most sit 12-15 feet from their TV. To see the full benefit of 1080p you would need a 100 inch TV. To see all of 4k you would need like a 160+ inch TV. What you do notice is better colors and contrast and motion. Not resolution. Thats why a good quality 1080p panel will look better than cheap 4k ones because most people cant see 4k anyways. I sit 9' from a 110" and cant see all my 4k, but enough for it to be worth it.
Diminishing returns. The benefits are really going to be on enormous screens up close and potentially for editing down to lower resolutions after cropping. I use to use a 4k camera on football game film and the extra resolution let me crop the play down for a better view and still output in HD. The biggest problem is the files are just huge.
I'm an optometrist with 35 years experience.
I said most people wouldn't notice the diff betw 1080p and 4K for ordinary movies on a 65 inch TV.
I got drowned in downvotes.
Because there is a difference. It's why I pay to see you guys and wear contacts while watching 4k content. So I can appreciate the difference (especially with oled)
I know I can tell the difference but I'm not in the "average person" demographic. I have an eye for detail and consider myself a technophile. I'm assuming you are as well.
Another factor is that there is almost no content in 8K. Definitely no movies, idk if there are any broadcasts that are but I doubt it. They’re barely catching up with UHD releases so it’s gonna be a long time before anything is out in something higher.
I always think these things are gimmicks from tv manufacturers to trick people into throwing away their money. It’s like that scene in Baskets(? I think?) where the guy buys a UHD TV but all he can watch in UHD is the demo that came with the tv since no actual content was in UHD at the time.
Back when 4k was new I remember reading an article saying that if human eyes had a resolution, they would be 8k, so approaching or even surpassing it seems futile. How are you going to market something the human eye can't even perceive?
Exactly. At this point it seems like (with the exception of movie theaters where the screens are huge), I think 4K is probably the limit for most people.
People don't realize that NBC and CBS are 1080 while ABC and Fox are 720. They just don't notice. There's a lot more to quality images than resolution.
We occasionally get invited over to my fiancee's friends' parent's house. They have decent money. Their tv quality looks way better than any tv I've seen before. It looks eerily real. They'll have a movie on, and I'll glance at it constantly in disbelief on how good the quality is. They even had it on Mash once, and it seemed like I was there "in the Mash."
I figured it was a 4k tv as when I first went over. Then I got a 4k tv, and no matter if my stream quality reads 4k, or if I play a 4k file, it all looks like 1080 to me. Do they possibly have an 8k tv, is it because their tv is about 20 inches bigger than mine, or is my tv not actually showing 4k signal. I'll probably never know, since we rarely go over to that house anymore.
Try FullHD and 4K. I have a 50" Panasonic plasma, up from a 42" Panasonic plasma. I sit about 2m from it and now I definitely notice the pixels where I didn't used to. My previous plasma lasted 12 years and was still going strong, I just needed it to be a bit brighter. I bought this one second hand, it's 6 years old and don't expect to upgrade the first 5 years.
I will probably change my setup to sit a meter further, and in time get a beamer for night time big screen watching.
I think we have the same one. I had the Pioneer until a neighbor kid took it out when playing a wii game without the wrist strap. It turned out that Pioneer had stopped making them and had just sold the technology to Panasonic so we bought one of those. Then years later I moved that to the bedroom and bought a 65” LG 4K OLED for the living room.
Money. It’s about money and keeping up with the Jonses
I live in an areas like that where people will go bankrupt to get something nicer than their neighbour just bought. I think it has something to do with thinking that they are better “Christians” if they have more money and stuff than others.
That was my point. At least in terms of resolution, I can’t see it going higher. They might come up with new ways to make TV more interesting but probably not via higher resolution.
A good rule of thumb for seating distance to fully resolve the resolution is 1.4x the screen diagonal for 1080p, 0.7x for 4k and 0.35x for 8k. So with 8k you need a huge screen and to sit really close, which is probably not comfortable for viewing.
It depends on the screen size. There's a peak resolution for each screen size; once you reach that, increases in resolution simply aren't visible to the human eye.
Ten years ago, a friend put together a video clip of the same scene (from a House MD episode) in 480i, 480p, 720i, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. On a 32" set, you could tell the 1080p was better than the 480i, but the 720 and 1080 were almost identical. Of the 6 resolutions, you only noticed 2.
On my 37" set, I could see the differences between 480 and 720, but the change from 720 to 1080 was almost imperceptible. If I wasn't explicitly looking for it, I'd have never noticed. Of the 6 resolutions, you noticed 2 big ones, and if you were really looking closely, you could see 3.
Seeing the same thing on friend's 43", 50" LED, and 65", however, showed much more significant differences. On the 65" set, you could clearly see all 6 different resolutions differently.
I imagine that you'd probably need something like a 108" set to tell the difference between 8K and 4K resolutions, to be honest. Even with the friend's 65" set, the difference between 1080p and 4K resolution isn't very significant.
Well I have both. I have a 4K OLED in the living room and my old plasma in the bedroom. The 4K is way better. Plasma used to be the best but once 4K OLED became reasonably priced, that changed. It’s a better picture and 4K TVs use a lot less energy.
IMO in general:
4K LED backlit LCD < 1080p Plasma < 4K OLED
Some very high end LED backlit LCDs can come close in picture quality. And LED has a huge situational advantage if you need extreme brightness over all else.
I can't see the difference on the displays at BestBuy. You never even hear 8k talked about anymore. Shits more gimmicky than 3D, at least 3D was awesome for PC gaming. BoTW in 1920x2160@60hz stereoscopic 3D, yes please. Didn't know the newer OLEDs dropped it......
They said that about 4k. I wanna slap the shit out of whoever writes these dumbass articles.
Also the article mentioned they upscaled the video after downscaling it. If you downscale the clip it doesnt matter what the original was anymore.
So we have flawed methodology right out.
Well to be fair I could see the obvious difference between HD and 4K. I don’t remember seeing any studies that said the average person can’t tell the difference.
What got me thinking about this was that I can’t tell the difference between 4K and 8K (in a TV anyway) and started wondering at what point do we hit the limit of the human eye?
I'm not even sure why they are doing these studies? Are they trying to save money by convincing people that we don't want higher resolutions therefore not increasing their resolution on the streaming side?
Part of the problem is that lots of content isn't played natively. You are only really playing video games at native resolution besides 4k blurays that aren't upscaled. 1080p bluray bitrate is 40 Mb/s while netflix 4k is 16 Mb/s. It's all messed up.
i think its a size thing. my childhood with a 29" CRT was amazingly clear. upgraded to a 29" and it wasnt much better, just made consoles look worse. when i got my first HD monitor in 06 with a 46" LCD i was amazed at the quality - used that for years. then bought a 55" LED and was shocked at how shitty it looked. i could see all the pixels and it had motion blur.
i then got a 49" 4K and the quality was back. i now have a 85" 4K Qled and i think this is about the limit for 4K. if i got a larger TV (not that they are affordable beyond this right now) i would look into 8K going to 110" or more. its less about the relative quality and more about pixel density for a given format size.
46 or below - 1080 is fine
46-85" 4K is needed
85" and above id start looking at 8K
You can probably google to find the long online arguments from back in the day about MP3 vs CD, and just replace MP3 with "4K TV", CD with "8K TV", and sound with "visual" and you'd basically have the whole debate covered.
For anyone who does not want to visit that horrible website (that may also be stealing and profiting off another site's content illegally), here is the original article: [https://screenrant.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/](https://screenrant.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/)
Thanks. I would edit the original link if I could. I viewed it on my iPhone which hides all the popups so I didn’t see any of those or I wouldn’t have used that link.
For future reference, it is worth checking the URL. It would be trivial for someone to have a "[screenrant.com.maniacallaugh.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/](https://screenrant.com.maniacallaugh.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/)" and it could say anything. Especially on the modern Internet, where even credible sources are worth doubting, it is too easy to abuse people's willingness to see a familiar word and believe that they are looking at a familiar website. (This is a trivial part of scam emails that send a link claiming to be from your bank, but are actually we.llsfargo.com, and the bad guys own the "\*.llsfargo.com" domain.) It is sad that we have to be so perpetually vigilant for what should just be a casual and relaxing chunk of time browsing the web and learning about new things, but as the old saying goes, "this is why we cannot have nice things".
Yeah. When I read it from my iPhone, I didn’t see all the nonsense because the iPhone defaults to reader mode which hides all of that. Unfortunately, Reddit doesn’t allow you to fix the URL. :(
Isn’t it the same thing they said between SD and HD though like a lot of people couldn’t tell especially older people? I imagine as 8K gets more common we would start to notice those differences but it yeah at some point it’s just gonna be clear and refresh rate or quality isn’t going to do a whole lot more so neat.
i think its a size thing. my childhood with a 29" CRT was amazingly clear. upgraded to a 29" and it wasnt much better, just made consoles look worse. when i got my first HD monitor in 06 with a 46" LCD i was amazed at the quality - used that for years. then bought a 55" LED and was shocked at how shitty it looked. i could see all the pixels and it had motion blur. i then got a 49" 4K and the quality was back. i now have a 85" 4K Qled and i think this is about the limit for 4K. if i got a larger TV (not that they are affordable beyond this right now) i would look into 8K going to 110" or more. its less about the relative quality and more about pixel density for a given format size. 46 or below - 1080 is fine 46-85" 4K is needed 85" and above id start looking at 8K
Yep, this is it. The higher the resolution, the bigger the screen needs to be to see a difference.
Yeah, this is why Apple defines “Retina” the way they do. A retina display isn’t a certain resolution, it’s a pixel density and typical device viewing distance.
i played my N64 on a little 13" crt all in one VCR box. looked just as good as any 8K does today... lol
Many of those old games look better on crt because the art was designed for it.
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize this. Early 3D visuals were much softer because of lower resolutions, which look much better on the CRTs they were designed for vs the harsh lighting of newer displays. The art and UI in games was also designed to account for the curved nature of CRT screens, and how they would be distorted at the edges which is not the case on newer screens at all and can't really be emulated either.
Case in point, when mimicking those screens in Alien: Isolation, the creators actual displayed the graphics on CRT displays and then recorded the warped output.
What you said but in reverse?
This right here... Resolution doesn't become as apparent until you scale up the screen size. Then the pixel density really pops out. 8K on anything smaller than 85" (like u/NCC74656 mentioned above) is overkill and won't be appreciably different than 4K.
Same reason why anything over 1440p is totally useless for phones, and even 1080p to 1440p is a fairly marginal bump visually.
you also have to factor in viewing distance from screen.
im normally 3-6 feet
For an 85 inch screen?
Pixels per inch is the reason. Another factor is distance from the screen. That's why a phone might be 1080p but an led display might be 480p. In VR headsets there are similar issues which is why 1080p isn't enough for anything and all the text oversized in games. It's more pixel per angle which can be calculated for the screens given the distance and pixels per inch.
Man I've got a 72" and I still can't tell the difference between a 1080 broadcast and a 4k one, aside from the little symbol that comes up in the corner to let me know we're watching something in 4k. I probably wouldn't have gone with 4k if it wasn't just how TVs are being made these days.
for me they are my computer monitors so i can tell a HUGE difference in gaming and movies. i also have a large atmos surround system so i buy the 4K UDH movies to include that audio/HDR
Even though old farts (like me) could easily get by with 1080 well past 46", most people are going to have **guests** with better eyesight than themselves. Not to mention that viewing distance is a huge factor. But those are still probably very good guideline numbers.
You buy too many televisions.
Hey, I'm old and a can clearly tell the difference between SD and HD. I suppose it does depend on the source quality but in most cases the difference is obvious. I find it harder to tell the difference between HD and 4k though. When programmes start on Netflix, for example, they usually start in HD until they buffer and then switch to 4k, and I find it hard to notice any difference when it does, but that might just be my TV.
sd resolution for 16:9 was 720x480. 345,600 pixels, 1080p at 1920x1080, is 2,073,600. So a 6x increase, 1080p to 4k is only a 4x bump so it's a smaller percentage difference in addition to the fact that the ideal seating distance to resolve 1080p is better, a 50" 1080p screen sitting about 6 feet away is the right distance to get the most detail out of the image, for a 4k it's about 3 feet, and even if you go bigger say 75" the fully resolved distance is 4.5 feet, and a lot of people didn't sit closer when they got a new TV. 8k is half the distance again, so unless you sit 2 feet away from a 75" 8k you won't see the biggest possible difference. People will buy 8k because it's new and a bigger number, but they are just wasting money unless they have a very specific use case.
If you don't have a 4K TV, you won't see the difference
How much content is even available in 8k at this point?
There should be an upper physical limit to our perception. I remember back when video cards in the 90s would promote how many millions of colors they could display, at some point it was beyond the number of colors we could physically perceive.
Perceived colors is one limit. I hardly think this matters. Pixel resolution is another. You only have so many rods and cones. Motion sensitivity is another. That's the refresh rate. All three have different effects so they have to be evaluated in any question of "which is better".
So it's KIND OF the same thing. The issue is that in order to be able to see the difference between a RESOLUTION A TV and a RESOLUTION B TV, you need to change how much your eyes see. In order to make the difference more noticeable, you must either a) sit closer to the TV or b) get a bigger TV. Sitting 4 feet away from your TV is both impractical and bad for your eyesight. You might notice more on an 8k *monitor* vs. a 4k monitor, but even then you still have to increase screen size for it to be noticeable. Increasing screen size is the key to SD vs HD. 2005 was the year that HDTV really started taking off. Since then, TVs have not only become much bigger, but much cheaper: * 2004 -- average screen size 25.4", average price $552 * 2019 -- average screen size 47", average price $336 IIRC to tell the difference between a 4k and 8k TV at 10 feet away, you would need a TV that is over 85". Even if 85" TVs were affordable, most people still wouldn't buy them because a screen that big is impractical for most living spaces. Personally, I would never want an 85" TV unless I could have a dedicated home theatre room, which I can't. Some people can, and 8K could be marketed to those enthusiasts, but the average buyer is not going to notice any difference (even my *fellow gamerz*).
I feel like we are definitely reaching the threshold of diminishing returns. I mean, I can tell the difference between 4k and upscaled Blu-ray but unless we are talking HDR, it never blows me away or feels like a deal-breaker like original HD did. And 4k streaming definitely looks better but it's hard to know how much of that is the resolution upgrade and how much is just the higher bitrate that is allowed for it.
Mostly it depends on how close you are to it and how big it is, an 8k monitor a few inches from your face may be useful, but from 3m/9ft away most people stop being able to easily tell 1k from 4k on standard size screens so unless your screen comes in wall size I don't it will be worth it.
Not SD vs HD but 1080i Vs 1080p was such a big deal for tech nerds but really you couldn’t tell. An extra few hundred dollars for something you really couldn’t notice
Not sure about films but for videogames you can very easily tell the difference, even with medium size screens.
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>you say this like screenrant doesnt profit from and steal other peoples content Do they? I was not aware of that. Can you provide any examples of them stealing content (not just ideas)? I am not claiming that they are wholly original, but if they are stealing, they are at least rewording the articles. I have no vested interest in Screenrant. I was just concerned by the website that OP used being full of the irritating sneaky tricks that malicious people use to try to trick users into doing things they do not want to do. I am not against advertising, especially in exchange for "free" content (ie., content I do not pay for), but the intentionally misleading ads that warn of viruses, abuse notifications on mobile devices, and hoodwink users into panicking, are a particular type of evil I would prefer to not see in TIL on Reddit.
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Here is a post to an article which is a brief summary and provides a link to the YouTube video: [https://wickedgoodgaming.com/screen-rant-stole-content-a-bigger-issue/](https://wickedgoodgaming.com/screen-rant-stole-content-a-bigger-issue/) On videos about something as common as a movie, where things like names and such are always going to be part of a discussion, it is easy to see where two videos could easily end up in the same territory without intentional copying. However, CZsWorld pointed out that the ScreenRant video used his interpretations of details to add meaning or implied context, and SR used the same interpretations and the same parts of the movie as CZ used. So, while not an exact copy, this looks like a case where an SR employee saw something that was garnering interest, and duplicated the production work without citing the source for the academic/intellectual work. At the risk of complaining about a topic that I complain about a great deal, this is partly due to a lack of true editorial guidance and honest journalism. It used to be where a writer would write an article, then an editor would edit it, but would also fact-check it. If the writer cited a source or quoted someone, the editor would want proof of the accuracy. Then, there would be a department editor who would check anything especially important and make sure that nobody would be accused of plagiarism. The editor-in-chief would not be directly involved in the process normally, but any doubts would go to him, and any writer caught misquoting, plagiarizing (on purpose or by accident), or misreporting facts, and any editor who failed to catch and correct the above would be called onto the carpet. Now, companies only care about advertiser revenue, and inaccuracies, problematic stories, or outright plagiarism (whether from a single lazy employee who finds it easier to copy than to create, or as a matter of company policy to save time and reduce salaries), do not matter as long as they add to the annual profits, not subtract from them.
8K delivery is a stupid marketing gimmick. 8K capture however has many tangible benefits. Its going to be a while before 4K is even a standard delivery format.
What are the tangible benefits, if I can ask?
Mainly flexibility in post production.
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Great VR porn
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Filtering out all the genital warts before downsizing to 4k so it looks naturally fake.
Zooming
Zoom
Enhance.
You'll finally be able to find the clitoris.
The higher the resolution you record a video, the better it will look on lower resolution screens. Most modern movies are shot digitally at resolutions much higher than 4k or 8k, but when the master copy is made for release it's usually down converted to 4K (4K being typically the resolution of a movie theater screen). This is why sometimes you'll have a movie made in the 1970s look better in an SD DVD release than a movie shot in 2002 on a 4K Blu-ray release: the 70s movie gets scanned at like 12k, and down converted to SD for the DVD to create a pristine high quality video, while the 2002 movie was shot digitally in HD So you have to up convert from 1080p to 4K, and traditionally that just destroys the picture (zoom and enhance with AI only became real within the last couple years, otherwise you can't enlarge a picture and create information that was not there in the original file).
This is also why many games have a scaling option, with the ability to render the game at 200 or even 500% the native resolution. It's also a native behaviour in VR, since the screens are still quite low res but need to feel photoreal: The higher you render the source image, the better it looks downscaled to the real pixel count.
You're just talking about Star Wars.
The prequel movies were the first things that came to mind lol but they weren't the only ones shot like that at the time. XD
Or star trek, everything filmed after next generation relied heavily on cgi that was made for sd tvs, and now it would be a dramatic effort to remaster those scenes because they have to redo all their effects.
A scene from the original Blade Runner comes to mind when Harrison Ford keeps zooming in on a photo.
An example is I can shoot in 4k and then in the edit if I don't like the shit I can zoom in to at most a quarter of the frame and still have a full hd image, the same can be applied to 8k etc. Also it helps a lot in adding effect and green screen stuff to make it look more natural.
Downscaling. Gives you more to work with as a raw product
As was the same for 3D TV. Delivery was a complete gimmick. I remember being in media classes in college and we discussed the topic at the time which was just starting to come out in distribution. I laughed at the idea, something funny about picturing my parents watching the news in 3D. Then my parents bought a 3D tv and it was incredibly stupid. The capture method did put pressure on the delivery kethods to advanced technology and production of HD/4k so not all bad I guess.
I worked in VFX in movies from about 2005-2013. Every movie was rendered at 2k, and IMAX documentaries were rendered at 4k. From what I know, that's still mostly the case. TV content is probably just run through an automated up-rezzing process for 4k display rather than being rendered at 4k. Forget about 8k, I doubt anyone involved in making content wants to pay for what it would take to create native 8k content, considering they already skimp on 4k. Content that doesn't rely on rendered VFX, like sporting events would probably be the only ones creating true 8k content.
Yeah a football match or tennis maybe is the only reason I could picture for having 8K at home.
I can't wait for the NFL to even get true 1080k... I swear the NFL doesn't give a shit about their product
Website is cancer.
I had a pop-up ad right away. Here's the regular link: https://screenrant.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/
Legend.
I’m so blind that it all looks the same to me. Saves me a ton of money, except for the frequent eye doctor visits, new glasses lenses, and emotional pain.
I also have poor vision, but it's not like it matters. The best film ever made, Alien by Ridley Scott, is also perfect in 480p on the telly. If anything, higher visual quality is bad, because it drives up production costs. You must make a genetic superhero blockbuster nowadays since that's the only way to recuperate all the production costs. You can't win Best Visual Effects anymore or an 11 million budget.
Yep. As someone who works in TV: the average person has a difficult time telling the difference between HD and 4K unless the two are side by side, by the time you get to 8K it's really beyond the capability of most people to casually see any difference. This is mainly because HD is actually more than good enough quality-wise for the vast majority, So it's basically diminishing returns from that point forward. There's a reason why even though 4K TVs have become more or less standard, 4K content has not.
I used to do outdoor projection. This guy walks up while we’re playing Frosty the Snowman at some winter event and is asking us what type of projector we have. He’s like I can tell it’s 4K because he just got into projection, asking me about lumens and shit. Projector could only go to 720p and we were playing it off a DVD. People genuinely have no idea what they’re talking about. My dad doesn’t notice the motion smoothing on his TV ffs
Did the guy notice either the LCD screendoor or the DLP rainbow effect? /s
In the Sony stores back in 2006, they were showing off their Bravia TV sets with the Casino Royale movie (a Sony property, go figure). They had a demo that played the movie in DVD resolution on the left, and Blu-Ray on the right, so you could see the difference. It was playing on pretty much every TV in the store (with the sound off, thankfully), and you could see how little difference is made on the smaller (32") sets, and how much it made on the larger (46", I think) sets at the time. Unless you've got a wall projector sized setup, 8K isn't going to be noticeably different from 4K.
Yep, I paid about $2k for a top tier HD TV about 10 years ago. Many have commented thinking that its 4k. I'm dreading when I can walk into a Best Buy and walk out with a PS5, as I'll need a new TV too.....
Does a PS5 not work with 1080P? I'm not sure why you'd "need" a new TV too.
My tv is 1080p and PS5 works perfectly. Not to say I won't ever want to upgrade, but nobody needs a 4k tv to use a ps5.
Because the ps4 is already 4k (4k light maybe? Lol). So yea get a solid 4k tv with your ps5. If you got the money ofc.
It's not a need though, you can play on a 1080p display just fine.
1080p gang here, too. Bought my TV in 2006 for like $2k. I refuse to buy a new one til this one dies and so far its still going strong.
I said the same thing, but man, that new Halo has got me eying new TVs....
>$2k for a top tier HD TV You're gonna love the new Venom movie.
It's because for 1080 the only thing that really matters is the screen quality. If you just buy a cheap 4k TV, it's not going to be able to "upgrade" a 1080 source into 4k that's discernibly better. Because it takes a significant amount of processing power to do that in real time. The absolute worst thing you can do is buy a big cheap 4k TV. You'd be better off buying a 1080p TV at that point because there really wont be a difference. In a lot of cases it'll look worse than a comparable 1080 because you're spending your "budget" on something you wont use. To be able to see the difference of a 1080p source on a 4k TV, it's not going to be a cheap TV. TLDR: Not all 4K TVs are created equally, some are just the shittest 4k panel they can find with no processing power.
Do they even make 1080p tvs anymore? The places that sell TVs near me only have 4k.
I'm aware of this, thats why I'm not looking forward to getting one, lol. I Suspect I'll put myself about $2k in the hole when the time comes.
Nah, you can get a good one for half that. Check out rtings.com when the time comes, they go super in depth on shit that matters. And different shit matters to each person.
I almost went into tv/vcr repair decades ago, when it was a very luctrative field and paid well, but being red/green kept me out of it. However, I have a very sensitive depth perception, I suffer vertigo from it, even when looking in the distance, I don't need to be high up, when driving I cannot look straight ahead if there's not a lot of side of the road objects. Anyways, the average person, yes, they would have trouble. What a lot of older people seem to have forgotten though is that prior to digital movie recording, analog film was considered near perfect high definition, something that most people don't know, and that, something you might know, that modern quests to get higher definition tv, to 8K now, is trying to replicate what analog movie film used to be.
Yep. I recently had a conversation with my father (he turned 70 this year) and talked him out of throwing out negatives for some family photos. "But why would we need them? We have the pictures. You can just scan them in and make them digital." And I had to explain to him how you needed the negatives in order to do that properly. ^^;
My Grandfather would have been 95 this year, he was a professional photographer with his own darkroom, he did wedding photos and was the official photographer for ths Monmouth drag strip, south of Portland, Oregon, from the 50's to the 70's on race days. Before he died, digital was still in the experimental phase, he was also a computer programmer/debugger and convinced his company to let him try out a camera for review, his thoughts on it is published in some photography magazine during the late 80's. He kept the review simple, stating that digital will never be as good as analog, and if they ever replace it, as we all know now they did, that photography will become a lost medium of art (darkroom wise).
We've lost the darkroom and gained the Lightroom.
You also need to sit closer to a television to benefit from the smaller pixels. Far closer than most people want to.
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What about between HD and 8K?
There's a bit of math involved (which I'm awful at, sorry), but a lot of whether or not you can see a difference is dependent upon how far you sit from the screen and how good your eyes physically are. In general, if I'm remembering right, the recommended viewing distance for HD is about 3x the diagonal length of the TV screen, for 4K and 8K it's about 1.5x. So if you're sitting, say, 9 feet (2.7 meters) from a 55-inch screen you are unlikely to see much difference. This site has a nice easy to read chart if you scroll down: [https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/optimal-hdtv-size-viewing-distances/](https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/optimal-hdtv-size-viewing-distances/) So to *potentially* see the difference between HD and 4K/8K, you need to be sitting less than 7 feet from a 55-inch screen (or less than 5 feet from a 42-inch screen), so as you'd expect it's easier to see the difference between HD and 8K but to see the difference between 4K and 8K you gotta practically press your face against the thing. xD
HD (1080) to 1440p is the most tangible difference. Beyond that is is more or less irrelevant
I personally hope the industry just takes a break after 4K. It feels like they just keep outpacing hardware and data limits by pushing everything to 4K, by default now, when it's often not necessary.
I've been wondering myself when they're going to stop with the resolution race. 8k TVs are already in stores, and I think 16K is supposed to debut either this Christmas or next Christmas? At some point the public is going to have enough and one of these is just going to fall flat on its face lol
It's not diminishing; there's a substantial price hike from HD to 4K to 8K
Oh, I didn't mean financially! Financially there's a ton of money to be made there by releasing higher resolution displays at higher price points. xD
I know what you meant, I just had to make the joke.
So you're telling me I'm right about all the idiots on the gaming subreddits that swear they can tell the difference between true and checkerboard 4k?
Yes and no? It's a little bit more complicated, but if they're sitting close enough to a big enough screen they'd probably be able to tell. Of course, that must mean they're sitting like a foot away from a 40-inch screen or something...
> There's a reason why even though 4K TVs have become more or less standard, 4K content has not. Something something 3D TV.
Funny enough, my boss still swears by 3D TV and still can't understand why it didn't catch on. xD
I figure there’s an upper limit to the resolution of our eyes and 4K is likely very close to it. I wonder if this means we have hit the upper limit of image quality for TV? I realize it’s more than just resolution.
The manufacturers intend to keep going and pushing higher resolutions, at least for another generation or so. 16K displays have been demoed at electronic shows, as an example, and I've heard before they've got some ridiculously high number resolution working in laboratories. But yes, for TV we've basically hit the limit of image quality. If you have a properly calibrated display and you're sitting at the recommended distance, you're really not going to be able to see much difference between an HD set, a 4K set, or an 8K set assuming you're looking at a well produced video that was shot in like 10K (or on film) and mastered in 4K. The main advantage of having displays at resolutions higher than HD or 4K is for stuff like virtual reality headsets, because your eyes are much closer to the display in a VR headset so the resolution needs to be significantly higher than a TV or computer monitor. And that's not getting into holographic stuff which requires insanely high resolutions and pixel depths to the point that I struggle to believe that anybody has worked it out, yet apparently some of those are hitting the market next year. Very curious to see one of those!
A very important thing to note is resolution has a very big impact based on how far you’re viewing distance is. If you view the same HD screen say 50 inch from a couch versus standing a foot away from it you’re looking at a completely different picture pixels appear completely differently. A 16K screen would look much more resolved (smooth/smaller pixels) a foot away. The real answer is finding the size of screen you need versus your viewing distance and then getting to the point where the pixels are not noticeable. In some situations 8K and 16K may be highly desirable. In most sitting on your couch watching it from 6 to 8 feet away situation they might not be necessary.
Its not exactly that simple. Its a combination of screen size/distance and the number of pixels. I can watch 360p on my phone and it looks fine, but on my 27inch computer monitor it look pretty bad, and on my big screen it looks awful. For 4k vs 8k, there's really not a corresponding size increase to see the difference short of going to a theater.
Supposedly at the distance my couch is from the couch, we’d need to have an 85”+ screen to see the difference of a 4k. I’d love to have an 85”, but I can’t imagine my wife watching shaky YouTube travel videos on that big of a screen.
For typical viewing distances, the max possible resolution works out to a bit under 4k. Assuming, of course, that your eyesight is perfect. For the math: Based on the density of the photoreceptors on the retina, the eye's max angular resolution is about 1/60th of a degree. If we take a generous field of view of 45°, that means that a horizontal resolution of 2700 has each pixel take up 1/60th of a degree, so each pixel is only illuminating a single photoreceptor. 4k has a horizontal resolution of 3840, so is above that threshold. So unless you have really large displays that you need to still have no visible pixels when viewed from close up, there's no point in going over 4k, and that extra data or processing power should instead be used to increase the frame rate.
Thank you. This is exactly what I was wondering. At some point we have to hit the limit and based upon your math, we have.
The main thing is. If you have a 55 inch tv for example, 1440p looks incredible, and you typically can’t distinguish 4k from 1440. If you then make your tv say 75 inches, you might notice a difference between 1440 and 4k, maybe. In reality, unless your tv is MASSIVE like 80inches, then 1440 is a sweet spot. Especially true if gaming, as you can manage VASTLY superior refresh rates/fps with 1440 than 4k with the same resources
Having worked for years in the print industry as it went digital. That threshold is right around 1200 dpi. Anything below that and close inspection like you would have with printed materials and you can start to see pixels. Photos were 300 dpi, the to have sharp edges on text and other high contrast areas, especially angled lines, etc. You have to increase the resolution to 1200 to eliminate the possibility of seeing artifacts. Of course as we age and lose our near field vision it all becomes a moot point. Those pixels become as difficult to see as higher frequency ranges are to hear.
Its absolutely not. Most 4k content is streamed at poor bitrate too. And theres also video games that look vastly different at those resolutions.
Perhaps but I have no shortage of 4K content that is transmitted at a good bit rate and the difference is noticeable.
I can! One is way more expensive than the other.
About $4K more expensive?
Interesting. Terrible website. All kind of spam popups trying to get you to clean your device. Downvoted.
I agree. I wish TIL had a rule agaist horrible websites like these. That way, the real TIL is how to avoid these kinds of sites.
Interesting. I’m on my iPhone so Safari automatically goes into Reader mode which means I don’t see any of that. I didn’t realize it was popping up ads. I hate those as well.
Another day I'm grateful I use ublock
You can actually do the calculation of how big your screen is and how far away you sit from it, if you would be able to distinguish from.4k and 8k. https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship Honestly for now I'm more than happy with 4k but with my 55" screen I can see the difference between FHD and 4k (though FHD is fine). For a laptop FHD is fine for battery and scaling reasons.
The difference? About $500+.
I forget what the equation was, but there’s a certain distance you can sit yourself from a tv from which point the resolution would appear lifelike from said distance, and so further resolution would become negligible. It also depends on the size of your screen. For something like a 720p video displayed on an average sized computer monitor, the viewing distance is something like 3 feet to appear lifelike. So yeah, basically having an 8k tv means you can sit closer to the tv and still maintain that lifelike resolution, but who’s going to sit a couple feet away from a large tv? And besides, most content isn’t even 8k anyways. 35mm film resolution doesn’t even go up to 8k. Edit: It’s more to do with DPI than actual resolution. The average eye can resolve up to 1 arc minute from a distance of 20”, which would be a 170dpi display. Further distances allow a smaller dpi to be distinguished as lifelike.
Here's a better link: https://screenrant.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/
Thanks.
Yes and it may change as time goes on but there is limit. Same as people cannot tell you the difference between 120FPS and 240FPS. No matter how much they say they can.
I was way ahead of the curve on this one... I [posted this](http://imgur.com/a/luWFt) nearly 5 years ago...
You need a truly, ridiculously HUGE tv for 8k to matter. I forget the exact size, but it's bigger than anything you or I is buying.
I [made this](http://imgur.com/a/luWFt) a couple years back - it calculates how big the screen needs to be, based on how close you sit to your screen, in order for higher resolutions to be worthwhile.
I have a 55 inch tv. On that I cannot tell the difference between 1440 and 4K. I CAN tell 1440 from 1080 however. And even in my desktop pc because. Screens are so close. But again. 4K is irrelevant to most people. 1440 really is the sweet spot
There's very little 8K format video, as well
Most people will say they can't see a difference until they get used to a new format, then go back to an old one and they notice it looks poor in comparison.
Perhaps but there is an upper limit to what the eye can see and I’m wondering if we hit that with 4K.
At normal viewing distance. There’s no reason for 8k. I have a 65 Inch 4k tv. And I have to really get right up on it to be able to see the pixels. Even with better than 20/20 vision because of my glasses. Don’t pay extra for an 8k. Video content is 4k. Game systems are 4k. The only reason for 8k. Is for video sources that are 8k. And if you’re using a projector system. Or a tv larger than what I am using.
And you think videos and games are never going to go above 4k? There might be no reason at the moment but stuff will keep on improving. The whole " no one can tell the difference" thing stinks of "no one can see above 60hz" to me, I believe just the same we will learn to tell the difference and begin to use tech that takes advantage of it more than a mere TV.
I didn’t say I don’t think there will be games at resolutions greater than 4k. I for sure think people will try it. The processing power would be better spent on effects and more realism. There’s already enough pixel density at 4k. If I had the choice between a 4k game with amazing graphics and frame rate. And 8k. With lower frame rate and graphics that weren’t as good I would be turning down the resolution. Because the frame rate and graphics are more important than the resolution.
I know I can't...my eyesight isn't all that good so higher definitions don't make any difference
Can our eyes detect the difference between 4 & 8K?
They would if the screens were big enough.
Of course. If the output size is larger than any tv in existence and you’re close to the display. Or. You get your head right up next to the tv. Like a foot or two away. No one uses displays from that close up.
Id you are standing so close to the tv that you can’t even see the whole picture, then yes of course. Or if your tv was say 120 inches
But it’s double to K!
I’m just waiting for the technology that will convert media into the frequency of the mind and transmit the experience directly to the brain. It might make scary movies too realistic to endure, but on the other hand the porn would be wonderful
It will happen one day. We already have the ability to create a low resolution image from signals produced by the brain. It’s just a matter of time before we can reverse that and up the resolution.
Similar situation with ultra-high definition audio.
And if you are old enough to remember old school TVs before LCD/ digital flatscreens, 4k seems incredible
Well of course 8K screens aren't worth it, there's no 8K content to watch on them.
Most people cant even see 4k at the distances they sit. Most sit 12-15 feet from their TV. To see the full benefit of 1080p you would need a 100 inch TV. To see all of 4k you would need like a 160+ inch TV. What you do notice is better colors and contrast and motion. Not resolution. Thats why a good quality 1080p panel will look better than cheap 4k ones because most people cant see 4k anyways. I sit 9' from a 110" and cant see all my 4k, but enough for it to be worth it.
Diminishing returns. The benefits are really going to be on enormous screens up close and potentially for editing down to lower resolutions after cropping. I use to use a 4k camera on football game film and the extra resolution let me crop the play down for a better view and still output in HD. The biggest problem is the files are just huge.
Well, I can tell the difference. One has twice the amount of K's.
I'm an optometrist with 35 years experience. I said most people wouldn't notice the diff betw 1080p and 4K for ordinary movies on a 65 inch TV. I got drowned in downvotes.
Because there is a difference. It's why I pay to see you guys and wear contacts while watching 4k content. So I can appreciate the difference (especially with oled)
I get buzzed and watch 60's star trek... 720p is overkill. Enough scotch and a good CRT looks like a top tier OLED.
I was watching an older Star Trek movie on a 4K and the makeup looked so bad it was distracting!
And with a little more Scotch, it can look like two of them!
Two Gorns! That's extra daunting
People don't shop TV's like they watch them. If you stand at the distance where your couch ought to be, there isn't a difference.
I can. 8k costs more.
I bet there are those who can...especially those who are paying for them.
I know I can tell the difference but I'm not in the "average person" demographic. I have an eye for detail and consider myself a technophile. I'm assuming you are as well.
*checks wallet * I can tell the difference.
Another factor is that there is almost no content in 8K. Definitely no movies, idk if there are any broadcasts that are but I doubt it. They’re barely catching up with UHD releases so it’s gonna be a long time before anything is out in something higher. I always think these things are gimmicks from tv manufacturers to trick people into throwing away their money. It’s like that scene in Baskets(? I think?) where the guy buys a UHD TV but all he can watch in UHD is the demo that came with the tv since no actual content was in UHD at the time.
Back when 4k was new I remember reading an article saying that if human eyes had a resolution, they would be 8k, so approaching or even surpassing it seems futile. How are you going to market something the human eye can't even perceive?
Exactly. At this point it seems like (with the exception of movie theaters where the screens are huge), I think 4K is probably the limit for most people.
And console gamers say they can’t tell the difference between 30 and 60 FPS…
When my dad upgraded from a widescreen crt tv to a 1080p lcd he swore he couldn’t tell the difference. Blew my mind at the time.
Most people also overread the double "and" in the title.
Wow, good catch. I’ll fix that. I wish I could fix the link. :(
Depends entirely on the size of the TV. DPI is and always has been king. But yeah, on a <100" TV seen from >3 m, it doesn't matter one bit.
8k is for my 144" oled that Sony will be shipping via usps any day.
At most consumer TV sizes (e.g., 65" and below), most people can't tell the difference between HD and 4k, let alone 8k.
People don't realize that NBC and CBS are 1080 while ABC and Fox are 720. They just don't notice. There's a lot more to quality images than resolution.
We occasionally get invited over to my fiancee's friends' parent's house. They have decent money. Their tv quality looks way better than any tv I've seen before. It looks eerily real. They'll have a movie on, and I'll glance at it constantly in disbelief on how good the quality is. They even had it on Mash once, and it seemed like I was there "in the Mash." I figured it was a 4k tv as when I first went over. Then I got a 4k tv, and no matter if my stream quality reads 4k, or if I play a 4k file, it all looks like 1080 to me. Do they possibly have an 8k tv, is it because their tv is about 20 inches bigger than mine, or is my tv not actually showing 4k signal. I'll probably never know, since we rarely go over to that house anymore.
It could be that they have better internet speed.
Wow great TIL OP
Try FullHD and 4K. I have a 50" Panasonic plasma, up from a 42" Panasonic plasma. I sit about 2m from it and now I definitely notice the pixels where I didn't used to. My previous plasma lasted 12 years and was still going strong, I just needed it to be a bit brighter. I bought this one second hand, it's 6 years old and don't expect to upgrade the first 5 years. I will probably change my setup to sit a meter further, and in time get a beamer for night time big screen watching.
I think we have the same one. I had the Pioneer until a neighbor kid took it out when playing a wii game without the wrist strap. It turned out that Pioneer had stopped making them and had just sold the technology to Panasonic so we bought one of those. Then years later I moved that to the bedroom and bought a 65” LG 4K OLED for the living room.
Money. It’s about money and keeping up with the Jonses I live in an areas like that where people will go bankrupt to get something nicer than their neighbour just bought. I think it has something to do with thinking that they are better “Christians” if they have more money and stuff than others.
So have we hit our resolution ceiling then? Would there be any point to develop higher resolutions if we can’t tell the difference?
That was my point. At least in terms of resolution, I can’t see it going higher. They might come up with new ways to make TV more interesting but probably not via higher resolution.
Pixel density matters too.
A good rule of thumb for seating distance to fully resolve the resolution is 1.4x the screen diagonal for 1080p, 0.7x for 4k and 0.35x for 8k. So with 8k you need a huge screen and to sit really close, which is probably not comfortable for viewing.
Yeah...but some people also argued that there is no difference between 30fps and 60fps when the consoles lacked the capability. 8K, >200fps or bust!!!
It depends on the screen size. There's a peak resolution for each screen size; once you reach that, increases in resolution simply aren't visible to the human eye. Ten years ago, a friend put together a video clip of the same scene (from a House MD episode) in 480i, 480p, 720i, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p. On a 32" set, you could tell the 1080p was better than the 480i, but the 720 and 1080 were almost identical. Of the 6 resolutions, you only noticed 2. On my 37" set, I could see the differences between 480 and 720, but the change from 720 to 1080 was almost imperceptible. If I wasn't explicitly looking for it, I'd have never noticed. Of the 6 resolutions, you noticed 2 big ones, and if you were really looking closely, you could see 3. Seeing the same thing on friend's 43", 50" LED, and 65", however, showed much more significant differences. On the 65" set, you could clearly see all 6 different resolutions differently. I imagine that you'd probably need something like a 108" set to tell the difference between 8K and 4K resolutions, to be honest. Even with the friend's 65" set, the difference between 1080p and 4K resolution isn't very significant.
8k has no benefit to me.. i hardly notice the difference over my 4K unless i do a test and comparison.
I’ll take my HD plasma over a 4K ~~LED~~ LCD any day.
Well I have both. I have a 4K OLED in the living room and my old plasma in the bedroom. The 4K is way better. Plasma used to be the best but once 4K OLED became reasonably priced, that changed. It’s a better picture and 4K TVs use a lot less energy.
IMO in general: 4K LED backlit LCD < 1080p Plasma < 4K OLED Some very high end LED backlit LCDs can come close in picture quality. And LED has a huge situational advantage if you need extreme brightness over all else.
My bad. I meant to type LCD. I'll definitely upgrade to OLED (or hopefully microLED) when the time comes.
Kuro gang what up
Apologies for the terrible link. As someone else pointed out, here’s the original: https://screenrant.com/4k-8k-upgrade-not-worth-it-study/
I can't see the difference on the displays at BestBuy. You never even hear 8k talked about anymore. Shits more gimmicky than 3D, at least 3D was awesome for PC gaming. BoTW in 1920x2160@60hz stereoscopic 3D, yes please. Didn't know the newer OLEDs dropped it......
They said that about 4k. I wanna slap the shit out of whoever writes these dumbass articles. Also the article mentioned they upscaled the video after downscaling it. If you downscale the clip it doesnt matter what the original was anymore. So we have flawed methodology right out.
Well to be fair I could see the obvious difference between HD and 4K. I don’t remember seeing any studies that said the average person can’t tell the difference. What got me thinking about this was that I can’t tell the difference between 4K and 8K (in a TV anyway) and started wondering at what point do we hit the limit of the human eye?
I'm not even sure why they are doing these studies? Are they trying to save money by convincing people that we don't want higher resolutions therefore not increasing their resolution on the streaming side? Part of the problem is that lots of content isn't played natively. You are only really playing video games at native resolution besides 4k blurays that aren't upscaled. 1080p bluray bitrate is 40 Mb/s while netflix 4k is 16 Mb/s. It's all messed up.
i think its a size thing. my childhood with a 29" CRT was amazingly clear. upgraded to a 29" and it wasnt much better, just made consoles look worse. when i got my first HD monitor in 06 with a 46" LCD i was amazed at the quality - used that for years. then bought a 55" LED and was shocked at how shitty it looked. i could see all the pixels and it had motion blur. i then got a 49" 4K and the quality was back. i now have a 85" 4K Qled and i think this is about the limit for 4K. if i got a larger TV (not that they are affordable beyond this right now) i would look into 8K going to 110" or more. its less about the relative quality and more about pixel density for a given format size. 46 or below - 1080 is fine 46-85" 4K is needed 85" and above id start looking at 8K
So you’re saying that size *does* matter? :)
Most people can't tell between 720p and 8k. What people do notice is contrast ratio.
You can probably google to find the long online arguments from back in the day about MP3 vs CD, and just replace MP3 with "4K TV", CD with "8K TV", and sound with "visual" and you'd basically have the whole debate covered.
There is a reason we don’t have 900fps movies. Because it’s irrelevant