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LG Accidentally Leaks Apple iMac 8K Is Coming Later This Year
An anonymous reader writes LG accidentally revealed in blog post that Apple is planning to release a 8K iMac later this year. This news comes as a surprise as the leak came from a different company rather than Apple. LG is one of Apple's biggest display partners and has already demonstrated 8K monitors at CES in Las Vegas. They note that the panel boasts 16 times the number of pixels as a standard Full HD screen.
8K is useful for the movie industry filming in 4K. The 8K cameras can downsample the 8K to 4K and get better picture quality than just filming using a 4K image sensor.
It's useful for still photography - DSLRs are pushing 50 MB file sizes - a large 8K screen would be wonderful for Photoshop. Not so sure about the iMac format - that's basically just laptop parts slapped behind the panel. Maybe Apple can make an iMac + that's build from real computer parts.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The theoretical total screen display resolution of the MDA was 720×350 pixels. This number is arrived at through calculating character width (nine pixels) by columns of text (80) and character height (14 pixels) by rows of text (25). However, the MDA again could not address individual pixels; it could only work in text mode, limiting its choice of display patterns to 256 characters. Its character set is known as code page 437. The character patterns were stored in ROM on the card, and so could not be changed by software. The only way to simulate "graphical" screen content was through ASCII art.
I agree, and I misused the term.
That said, 2k *is* a real thing. Its a cinema / projector standard (usually around 2048x1536)
And cinema 4k is 4096 x 2160; whereas monitor resolution 4k is 3840x2160 -- which comes up a bit short. Cinema 4k refers to horizontal reslution being 4k (4096) vs it being 4x as many pixels as 1080p (1920x1080).
So yeah... I definitely abused the nomenclature; and I'll avoid calling 2560x1440 "2k" going forward as you are right... But its not like I started it. Nomenclature for resoultion standards is a godawful MESS.
Surely it depends on screen size and viewing distance?
4K is the limit of human visual perception.
The limit of visual perception is measured in pixels per angular distance. It doesn't depend on the number of pixels, but on their size and distance... at least until you get to the level where your entire field of view is covered by pixels that are small enough to be invisible at their given distance.
At the distance from my eyes to my desktop monitor (about 20 inches), I expect I can resolve pixels down do about 200 pixels per inch. My 30" monitor is about 26" wide by about 16" tall, which means that to reach the limit of my visual perception (assuming my estimate of 200 ppi is accurate; it may be a little low), I need 5200 horizontal pixels, about 5K. I'm hoping that within the next couple of years I can upgrade to a 40" monitor, though, and 8K would be about right for a display that size.
More pixels would be good if I sometimes want to lean closer to see fine details (and I do).
And, really, we absolutely do want sufficient resolution that pixels are indistinguishable, so we can have what appear to be perfectly smooth curves and arbitrarily fine lines. Smooth text, in particular, is much easier on the eyes. I have a MacBook Pro with a high-resolution display on my desk right next to my big monitor and it is sooo much more pleasant to look at.
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