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LG To Show Off New 55-Inch 8K Display at CES
MojoKid writes One of the most in-your-face buzzwords of the past year has been "4K," and there's little doubt that the forthcoming CES show in early January will bring it back in full force. As it stands today, 4K really isn't that rare, or expensive. You can even get 4K PC monitors for an attractive price. There does remain one issue, however; a lack of 4K content. We're beginning to see things improve, but it's still slow going. Given that, you might imagine that display vendors would hold off on trying to push that resolution envelope further – but you just can't stop hardware vendors from pushing the envelope. Earlier this year, both Apple and Dell unveiled "5K" displays that nearly doubled the number of pixels of 4K displays. 4K already brutalizes top-end graphics cards and lacks widely available video content, and yet here we are looking at the prospect of 5K. Many jaws dropped when 4K was first announced, and likewise with 5K. Now? Well, yes, 8K is on its way. We have LG to thank for that. At CES, the company will be showing-off a 55-inch display that boasts a staggering 33 million pixels — derived from a resolution of 7680x4320. It might not be immediately clear, but that's far more pixels than 4K, which suggests this whole "K" system of measuring resolutions is a little odd. On paper, you might imagine that 8K has twice the pixels of 4K, but instead, it's 4x.
8k won't be ready for anything any time soon. HDMI 2.0 doesn't even support 8k 30Hz, and few TVs have Displayport. 4k Blurays are taking their time arriving to market, and 50GB arguably won't be enough for 8k without a codec upgrade which would itself require a new disc player. What portion of existing bluray players have old HDMI ports or processors that can't handle 4k content? It's not like 4k TVs are high-margin items anymore -- I saw a nice 50" one at Walmart for $699 a few weeks ago, and there were cheaper ones online. The price has hit rock bottom before there's even the demand for them. Unlike 4k cameras, there are only a couple prototypes of 8k cameras, so almost all content will be rendered CG for a while.
I'd read countless arguments on Slashdot that human eyes can't discern resolution higher than 1080p in a 50" TV over 10 feet or so, before I actually watched a demo 4k TV running 4k content, for about 15 minutes. If you have a 50" TV in your bedroom, 5 feet away from where you're sitting, you can definitely notice a huge improvement in detail. I stepped about 15 feet away and in most scenes it was still usually an obvious, substantial improvement over 1080p.
An electronics retailer in Europe held a contest, setting a cordon that people had to stay behind, more than 10 feet away from two televisions, and were asked which was the 4k tv and which was the 1080p. 98% of people correctly guessed which was which. Maybe people asked others who cheated, but it suggests that "most people can't tell" is bullshit. I seem to recall when the Apple retina display claims first came out, a scientist mentioned that humans' actual acuity was about 50% better than what Apple was claiming. It's also worth noting that while a single still retina image may be at a certain DPI, there are psychovisual effects (like depth perception) that can improve the resolution inside the brain, beyond what one retina picks up at one time. The eyes also saccade all the time, which I seem to recall can be interpolated to improve resolution.
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Arguably, that depends on how large the display is. In the tablets and smartphones market(and, at least to an extent, smaller TVs and monitors) higher resolutions are mostly about aesthetic improvements. Between the limits of human dexterity on input devices and the limits of human vision you can't use the extra pixels to actually make UI elements smaller(it still has to be a certain minimum size for the user to see it, click it, or touch it, regardless of how many pixels fit in that physical area); but you can use them to make things look buttery smooth and more or less eliminate visible jaggies.
In larger panels, there is still a good deal of room(at least for users with decent eyes) to use additional pixels to add additional effective 'space' into a monitor of the same size. No longer being able to see the nasty huge pixels that result when some terrible person smears 1920x1080 over a 27 inch screen is nice(seriously, guys, WTF is up with the increasing sizes of 1920x1080 monitors? Used to be you could get 19.5/20-inch ones quite easily, now the market is rotten with 22 inch and higher); but it's the increase in work room that really makes the difference.
At 55" and average viewing distances of 8ft you're not going to notice all the detail of even 1080p. You literally need to be sat a couple of feet away to get the full benefit of 4K on a 55" display.
The people who are replying that the viewing distance charts are wrong need to understand what the recommendations apply to.
First, they apply to the average person, whoever that may be. Since we all have slightly different eyesight, there are people who will see jaggies at the recommended range and people who will not.
Secondly, the vast majority of the distance recommendations refer to televisions and video, not computer monitors and text or still images. Computer monitors tend to have more precise pixel color and lighting control which makes them sharper but also makes it easier to see jaggies.
The point is that the charts were developed for TVs playing video and they tend to be accurate for this usage. Any application beyond that is pretty much out of scope.
You do realize HDMI maxes out at 60Hz as well, right? All that "120Hz" bullshit is just marketers selling you crappy post-processing filters in the TV. And while HDMI did technically upgrade from a maximum of 24bpp to 48bpp in 2006, there's essentially zero content that actually uses that capacity, and that very few people can clearly distinguish the additional slight variations in color anyway, except in the most contrived tests - compression artifacts are *far* more visible, and going to 48bpp tends to make those much worse.
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