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HDTV Expert Alfred Poor Tells You What to Buy and What Not to Buy (Video)
Alfred Poor's website is called HDTV Almanac. That's where he talks about the latest HDTV industry news and changes. He also writes about HDTVs and monitors for a variety of industry publications and does some marketing consulting for manufacturers in the field. In this 17 minute video, Alfred tells us what features we should look for in our next TV buy and which ones aren't worth spending extra money on. He also says that for a variety of non-technical reasons, you might want to consider buying your next TV between now and June -- and says you should think about getting a 3D TV even if there aren't many 3D TV shows you want to watch right now.
In a couple of lines, what does he say?
Please buy the TVs whose manufacturers pay me more $$$ for.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Given the size of my living room, a 720p 50" Sony I bought years ago is doing just fine. It doesn't need 1080p, because at the distance I'm sitting from it, the eye can't tell the difference anyways.
http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html
BTW - this guy is no expert.
Who submitted this shite anyway? Oh, there was no submitter - it's a slashvertisement brought to you by roblimo. Can we have a way to down-mod stories? We've only been asking for that for years and years and years now. It would be better than those stupid anti_social_media buttons.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Yes, 4K television is under development. ("4K" is roughly equivalent to 4 times the resolution of 1080p, for those not familiar with the term.) I would not recommend waiting for 4K for several reasons. First, people are fine with watching DVDs (which are standard definition) on their HDTVs right now, and don't even bother getting the Blu-ray version of a movie (which is high definition). They tend to sit too far from the screen for its size, which means that they can't see the added detail anyway. They're not going to sit twice as close (or get a set twice as large) in order to get the extra detail that 4K offers. And we're probably at least 10 years away -- if that -- from having a distribution system (broadcast and physical media) that can get the image to your set in the first place. So I'm not going to postpone my purchase just for 4K technology.
Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac
The rest of your description is likewise meaningless. At 12 feet from the TV on a 50" screen, you CAN NOT physically tell the difference. It is impossible, your eyes don't have the resolution to handle it, and telling yourself otherwise is like telling yourself you need some $10,000 ethernet cables for your home network too.
This is not true. The acuity numbers you base this on (from the article linked earlier) are related to vision tests like you might undergo at an optometrist, where the measure is the smallest size text you are able to read at a given distance. "Nominal" vision in this case is 20/20, which means that the subject can resolve letters 20mm high at a distance of 20 feet - this is where the 1 arc-minute of visual acuity your linked article mentions appears to come from (and never mind that people have been measured with vision down to 20/8, which would reduce this significantly - about 0.4 arc-minutes).
This is useful information, but it doesn't actually mean what you seem to be claiming - that we can see no difference in features smaller than this, and any greater resolution is wasted. In tests where subjects are assessing whether two lines line up, acuity down to about 8 arc-seconds has been observed, which is actually better resolution than the physical receptors on the retina. Similarly, a single dark line against an evenly illuminated background can be observed down to a limit of about 0.5 arc-seconds, much finer than the physical detectors in the eye.
This isn't to say that we need displays capable of sub-1 arc-second resolution, but human vision is far more complicated than you make it out to be. Saying that there is no difference between a 720p display and a 1080p display at x distance and size because the pixels are too small to be individually resolved (based on results from a test for resolving letters) is simply not true. Most people probably can detect a difference, even if the difference is too small for them to really notice in moving pictures (or are just not bothered by it). Claiming that no one can see any difference and therefore anyone who doesn't follow that simplistic chart is an idiot is, simply, false.