Comments on: 4K: What You’re Not Missing

By: Ed Suominen

Ed Suominen — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 19:23:38 +0000

Interesting idea about hunting down an old plasma TV. Another benefit to it: Your TV won’t double as an Orwellian listening and preference reporting device.

By: Daniel Bastian

Daniel Bastian — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 13:21:00 +0000

NB: The purpose of the post is to define the specific conditions under which 4K matters. If we isolate the discussion merely to resolution (pixel count), the conditions required to resolve the full benefit may not be typical of most home setups. However if we broaden the discussion to ancillary benefits of 4K treatment (e.g., HDR rendering, increased color bit depths, expanded color gamuts, overall better feature offerings accompanying 4K sets, and with respect to gaming the various gameplay benefits associated with 4K-capable hardware), then the discussion changes and 4K begins to matter–quite a lot in some respects. But the important point to keep in mind is that the discussion has changed not primarily because of what the term signifies in terms of resolution but what the format offers *beyond* the scope of parochial comparisons of resolution.

By: Daniel Bastian

Daniel Bastian — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 13:19:00 +0000

In reply to The Excelsior.

What do you do if you don’t mind my asking? Are you editing video on professional monitors? If so, that is outside the bounds of the typical viewer, something I emphasize in the post. The point remains that you’re going to reap greater benefits from a 50-foot cinema screen than your typical viewing setup in the home. Human perceptual limitations are real, and 4K simply cannot make up for people who sit further away from their screen than necessary to realize its full benefit. (And this is assuming native 4K end to end, not upscaled, which again is still relatively rare.)

You mention Best Buy. A point I make explicitly in the post is that what you see in the showroom is an absolute best case scenario. It’s also highly atypical of the viewing conditions present in most homes. At the big box stores you’re seeing native 4K video end to end and you’re usually standing directly in front of 55″+ displays. This isn’t a good model for home environments, in which room layout and space considerations restrict seating distances to more realistic lengths.

As I wrote: “Resolution is about the distance from the screen as much as the size of the screen. The larger the screen and the closer your face is to it, the more resolution matters, and vice versa. It’s why commercial cinema and professional video editing are best positioned to capture the full benefits of 4K.” So if you’re someone who sits inches from the screen editing video and photo, 4K matters, absolutely, because you are within the predefined limits of human visual acuity. And if you’re feeding pictures to a projector and dedicated screen, this will also make 4K worthwhile for the same reason.

And because of those limitations, the contrast between SD and HD is far easier to point out to people (and requires less consideration of screen size and viewing distance) compared with HD and 4K.

FWIW, I used to do A/V installs on the side as well as display calibration in the DC area.

By: The Excelsior

The Excelsior — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 13:18:00 +0000

Granted there are diminishing returns in human perception as you increase resolution, and I don’t think there will be much of a generation beyond 4K (8K) because of the bandwidth tradeoffs, as long as your monitor isn’t smaller than about 42″ there is absolutely a big, noticeable difference between 1080p and 4K. This is not just because this is what I do for a living and have drank the Kool-Aid, any human being with minimally functional eye sight can walk into a Best Buy and see the stark difference.

And now that 4K monitors are essentially the same price as a regular TVs, (you can get 50″ HDR for about $1000) 4K is just WHAT TVs ARE NOW, you would be foolish to be an HD monitor now unless your rationale is only wanting to spend a few hundred bucks.