Slashdot Mirror
Latest TVs Are Ready for Their Close-Ups (wsj.com)
An anonymous share a WSJ article: The latest televisions have more pixels than ever. But can your eyes detect the difference? The answer is yes -- if you sit close enough. Old TVs had 349,920 pixels. High-definition flat screens bumped up the total to 2 million. Ultrahigh-definition sets inflated it to 8 million. And manufacturers are now experimenting with 8K TVs that have an astounding 33 million pixels. More pixels render hair, fur and skin with greater detail, but the benefit depends on viewing the screen from an ideal distance so the sharpness of the images is clear, but the tiny points of illumination aren't individually distinguishable. According to standards set by the International Telecommunication Union, that ideal distance is 3 times the height of an HDTV screen, 1.5 times the height of a UHDTV screen and .75 times the height of an 8K screen (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; here's a PDF copy of the newspaper). Given those measurements, viewers should sit 6 feet away from a 50-inch HDTV with a 24.5-inch tall screen. But they should sit just 3 feet from a UHDTV of the same size, closer than most Americans prefer.
I rather agree with you. Sales of something like a TV must be more or less a flatline, unless you can come up with something earth-shaking that no one else has -- and when there is a standard you have to follow for your TV to even operate, there's no room for that, not really. So hey, how about we push for a new standard every few years, so we make everyone want to throw away their perfectly-good working TV and buy a whole new one, so they can Keep Up With The Joneses? We all see that media hype can convince people of almost anything (like 'AI' being a real thing, or self-driving cars actually being safe and effective, or Trump being a good choice for POTUS) so it should be a snap to convince people that they need MORE resolution on their TV than they can actually discern with the naked eye, right? Audiophiles would agree with me considering how easily they can be convinced to buy $4000 speaker cables.
No, I'm not really being funny. But I am being sarcastic as hell.