This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Kind of a tangent, but properly encoded 1080p video with a decent bitrate actually looks pretty damn good.
A big problem is that we've gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube's 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.
Yeah I'd way rather have higher bitrate 1080 than 4k. Seeing striping in big dark or light spots on the screen is infuriating
For most streaming? Yeah.
Give me a good 4k Blu-ray though. High bitrate 4k
I mean yeah I'll take higher quality. I'd just rather have less lossy compression than higher resolution
A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.
YouTube is locking the good bitrates behind the premium paywall and even as a premium users you don't get to select a high bitrate when the source video was low res.
That's why videos should be upscaled before upload to force YouTube into offering high bitrate options at all. A good upscaler produces better results than simply stretching low-res videos.
This. The visual difference of good vs bad 1080p is bigger than between good 1080p and good 4k. I will die on this hill. And Youtube's 1080p is garbage on purpose so they get you to buy premium to unlock good 1080p. Assholes
HEVC is damn efficient. I don’t even bother with HD because a 4K HDR encode around 5-10GB looks really good and streams well for my remote users.
I can pretty confidently say that 4k is noticeable if you're sitting close to a big tv. I don't know that 8k would ever really be noticeable, unless the screen is strapped to your face, a la VR. For most cases, 1080p is fine, and there are other factors that start to matter way more than resolution after HD. Bit-rate, compression type, dynamic range, etc.
Seriously, articles like this are just clickbait.
They also ignore all sorts of usecases.
Like for a desktop monitor, 4k is extremely noticeable vs even 1440P or 1080P/2k
Unless you're sitting very far away, the sharpness of text and therefore amount of readable information you can fit on the screen changes dramatically.
The article was about TVs, not computer monitors. Most people don't sit nearly as close to a TV as they do a monitor.
Oh absolutely, but even TVs are used in different contexts.
Like the thing about text applies to console games, applies to menus, applies to certain types of high detail media etc.
So, a 55-inch TV, which is pretty much the smallest 4k TV you could get when they were new, has benefits over 1080p at a distance of 7.5 feet... how far away do people watch their TVs from? Am I weird?
And at the size of computer monitors, for the distance they are from your face, they would always have full benefit on this chart. And even working into 8k a decent amount.
And that's only for people with typical vision, for people with above-average acuity, the benefits would start further away.
But yeah, for VR for sure, since having an 8k screen there would directly determine how far away a 4k flat screen can be properly re-created. If your headset is only 4k, a 4k flat screen in VR is only worth it when it takes up most of your field of view. That's how I have mine set up, but I would imagine most people would prefer it to be half the size or twice the distance away, or a combination.
So 8k screens in VR will be very relevant for augmented reality, since performance costs there are pretty low anyway. And still convey benefits if you are running actual VR games at half the physical panel resolution due to performance demand being too high otherwise. You get some relatively free upscaling then. Won't look as good as native 8k, but benefits a bit anyway.
There is also fixed and dynamic foveated rendering to think about, with an 8k screen, even running only 10% of it at that resolution and 20% at 4k, 30% at 1080p, and the remaining 40% at 540p, even with the overhead of so many foveation steps, you'll get a notable reduction in performance cost. Fixed foveated would likely need to lean higher towards bigger percentages of higher res, but has the performance advantage of not having to move around at all from frame to frame. Can benefit from more pre-planning and optimization.
4k is way better than 1080p, it's not even a question. You can see that shit from a mile away. 8k is only better if your TV is comically large.
I think you overestimate the quality of many humans' eyes. Many people walk around with slightly bad vision no problem. Many older folks have bad vision even corrected. I cannot distinguish between 1080 and 4k in the majority of circumstances. Stick me in front of a computer and I can notice, but tvs and computers are at wildly different distances.
The study used a 44 inch TV at 2.5m. The most commonly used calculator for minimum TV to distance says that at 2.5m the TV should be a least 60 inches.
My own informal tests at home with a 65 inch TV looking at 1080 versus 4K Remux of the same movie seems to go along with the distance calculator. At the appropriate distance or nearer I can see a difference if I am viewing critically (as opposed to casually). Beyond a certain distance the difference is not apparent.
Exactly. This title is just clickbait.
The actual study's title is "Resolution limit of the eye — how many pixels can we see?".
8k no. 4k with a 4k Blu-ray player on actual non upscaled 4k movies is fucking amazing.
I don't know if this will age like my previous belief that PS1 had photo-realistic graphics, but I feel like 4k is the peak for TVs. I recently bought a 65" 4k TV and not only is it the clearest image I've ever seen, but it takes up a good chunk of my livingroom. Any larger would just look ridiculous.
Unless the average person starts using abandoned cathedrals as their livingrooms, I don't see how larger TVs with even higher definition would even be practical. Especially if you consider we already have 8k for those who do use cathedral entertainment systems.
(Most) TVs still have a long way to go with color space and brightness. AKA HDR. Not to speak of more sane color/calibration standards to make the picture more consistent, and higher 'standard' framerates than 24FPS.
But yeah, 8K... I dunno about that. Seems like a massive waste. And I am a pixel peeper.
ITT: people defending their 4K/8K display purchases as if this study was a personal attack on their financial decision making.
4k with shit streaming bitrate is barely better than high bitrate 1080p
But full bitrate 4k from a Blu-ray IS better.
An overly compressed 4k stream will look far worse than a good quality 1080p. We keep upping the resolution without getting newer codecs and not adjusting the bitrate.
Bullshit, actual factual 8k and 4k look miles better than 1080. It's the screen size that makes a difference. On a 15inch screen you might not see much difference but on a 75 inch screen the difference between 1080 and 4k is immediately noticeable. A much larger screen would have the same results with 8k.
Highly depends on screen size and viewing distance, but nothing reasonable for a normal home probably ever needs more than 8k for a high end setup, and 4K for most cases.
Contrast ratio/HDR and per-pixel backlighting type technology is where the real magic is happening.
If you read RTINGS before buying a TV and setting it up in your room, you already knew this. Screen size and distance to TV are important for determining what resolution you actually need.
Most people sit way too far away from their 4K TV.
Honestly after using the steam deck (800p) I'm starting to wonder if res matters that much. Like I can definitely see the difference, but it's not that big a deal? All I feel like I got out of my 4k monitor is lower frame rates.
Pixel density is what makes content appear sharp rather than raw resolution. 800p on a 7" screen is plenty, if you think about it a 50" 1080p TV is ~~almost 10x the size~~ more than 50x the size with a ~25% increase in (vertical) resolution
Sure but, hear me out, imagine having most of your project sourcecode on the screen at the same time without having to line-wrap.
with all the menus now days I mainly want sharp text
This is so much bullshit. 4K does make a difference, specially if playing console games on a large TV (65" and up).
I can barely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. I will probably never buy another TV.
Maybe I need glasses?
Maybe I need glasses?
Mosdef
The study doesn't actually claim that. The actual title is "Study Boldly Claims 4K And 8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes, But Is It True?" As with all articles that ask a question the answer is either NO or its complicated.
It says that we can distinguish up to 94 pixels per degree or about 1080p on a 50" screen at 10 feet away.
This means that on a 27" monitor 18" away 1080p: 29 4K: 58 8K: 116
A 40" TV 8 feet away/50" TV 10 feet away
1080p: 93
A 70" TV 8 feet away
1080p: 54 4K: 109 8K: 218
A 90" TV 10 feet away
1080p: 53 4K: 106 8K: 212
Conclusion: 1080p is good for small TVs relatively far away. 4K makes sense for reasonably large or close TV Up to 8K makes sense for monitors.
My desktop monitor is a 54" 4K TV that I sit about 3' from. It's somewhat difficult for me to pick out individual pixels even when I lean in. My living room TV is 70" 4K, but I sit 15' away from it. There's no way I could tell the difference in 4K and 1080 from pixel density alone. I can however tell the difference between 4K and 1080 streams because of how shitty low bitrates look. 4K streams crush all of the dark colors and leave you with these nasty banding effects that I don't see as often on lower resolution streams.
Hard disagree. 4K is stunning, especially Samsung’s Neo-QLED. I cannot yet tell a difference between 4K and 8K, though.
I have 65" 4K TV that runs in tandem with Beelink S12 pro mini-pc. I ran mini in FHD mode to ease up on resources and usually just watch streams/online content on it which is 99% 1080p@60. Unless compression is bad, I don't feel much difference. In fact, my digitalized DVDs look good even in their native resolution.
For me 4K is a nice-to-have but not a necessity when consuming media. 1080p still looks crisp with enough bitrate.
I'd add that maybe this 4K-8K race is sort of like mp3@320kbps vs flac/wav. Both sound good when played on a decent system. But say, flac is nicer on a specific hardware that a typical consumer wouldn't buy. Almost none of us own studio-grade 7.1 sytems at home. JBL speaker is what we have and I doubt flac sounds noticeably better on it against mp3@192kbps.
I didn’t get why HD tv was relevant at all. I really did not understand that at all.
Then I got glasses.
I suspect 4k matters for screens of a certain size or if you sit really close, but most of us don’t so it doesn’t matter.
This is highly dependent on screen size and viewing distance.
On a computer screen or a phone screen? No, it's not really noticeable. Hell, on some phone screen sizes/distances, you might not even be able to tell 720p vs 1080p.
On a 120"+ projector screen? Yes, it is definitely noticeable.
I have a small home theater and picked up a refurbished 4K LED projector (Epson 3200) coming from an old 1080DLP (Viewsonic 8200) - massive difference!
Sony Black Trinitron was peak TV.
Personal anecdote, moving from 1080p to 2k for my computer monitor is very noticeable for games
This finding is becoming less important by the year. It's been quite a while since you could easily buy an HD TV - they're all 4K, even the small ones.
Heh, I'm getting back to physical media, and this big 4K TV is literally the first time ever where I've actually constantly noticed that DVDs might get a bit pixely.
(And even so, I usually blame not so great digitisation. Some transfers of old obscure titles were really sloppy, you really didn't need a great TV to see the problems. Original was a black and white movie, the DVD was a bunch of grey mush.)
After years of saying I think a good 1080p TV, playing a good quality media file, looks just as good on any 4k TV I have seen, I now feel justified........and ancient.
4k is definitely a big improvement over 1080p. The average person probably doesn't have good eyesight, but that doesn't mean that it's a waste for everyone else.
simply incorrect. in some circumstances sure 1080p is sufficient, but if the tv is big, close, or both. then 4k is a definite and noticeable improvement.
4k looks sharper as long as the actual content is real 4k, even from afar.
I think the real problem is that anything less than 4k looks like shit on a 4k tv
