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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.
They had an electron beam than scanned across a shadow mask to the phosphors underneath.
The limit was the bandwidth of the analog signal, resulting in a measure called lines of resolution.
Well, the shadow mask kind of imposed a pixelization of a sort, so it was not simply a limitation of the analog signal bandwidth.
Shadow mask <-- close up of one.
I used to print color positive slides with a Nikon 8K printer, it was a long time ago but I remember very well you can see the difference from 4K with a loupe. Undoubtedly the image will incredible though personally I would love one for my desktop.
But they should sit just 3 feet from a UHDTV of the same size, closer than most Americans prefer.
This statement makes no sense. For one thing, what does being an American have to do with anything at all? Why would nationality affect how close people want to sit to their screens? Are the French so busy feigning disinterest that they need to sit that close to see what's on? Do the Brits need to sit that close because they have tiny screens they can quickly hide when the TV tax man comes around to collect? Would all of us Americans sit closer too, if not for the fact that our rampant obesity keeps us from doing so?
Come on.
More importantly, however, pixel density really has very little effect on where you should sit in relation to your TV. For people who have good enough eyes and actually care, it puts a lower bound on how close they can sit (i.e. a point at which they'll start to experience reduced quality due to the resolution of the TV), but it doesn't tell them where they should sit. The major factors in determining where one should sit are the size of the screen and how much of the field of vision one wants it to fill. Dolby, THX, and other industry groups tend to recommend sitting close enough to the screen that it fills more of the field of vision, providing a more "cinematic experience", but even their recommended seating distances (which are closer than most people seem to prefer) still have people far enough away that most people won't see any difference in terms of resolution (HDR and other advances notwithstanding) between a 1080p TV and a 4K TV. When the industry made the move to 4K, they blew past the point where resolution mattered for home theater setups, even for viewers with beyond 20/20 vision, in much the same way that the "DPI wars" in the printer industry eventually came to an end as it simply stopped mattering.
Which isn't to say that these resolutions are pointless. There are still numerous use cases where people sit closer to their displays (e.g. desktop computing) or have the display filling more of their field of vision (e.g. IMAX), so we still need higher resolutions for those sorts of use cases. And because passive 3D typically relies on polarization to direct half the pixels towards each eye, it requires that the screen support double the resolution you actually want to view content at, meaning that higher resolutions are still useful. And there are new possibilities that may be of interest as well as higher resolutions open up.
For instance, I recall seeing a patent that would have allowed up to 16 people to view a movie in 3D at the same time without any of them having to wear 3D glasses. The trick was having a projector screen with microscopic ridges angled such that each eye of each person saw a different set of ridges than any eye of any other person. More or less, there would be 32 copies of the image on the screen at any given time, with each eye only able to see one copy of the image. But to do that, you'd need to have a projector with such a ridiculously high resolution that it could hit each of those microscopic ridges perfectly. That notion seemed practically impossible back when it was proposed in the heyday of 1080p, but it suddenly seems a lot more viable as we start to talk about 8K reaching the market.
Of course, you're not competing with the real world. You're competing with the past. For the most part, this means film, but it can also just mean "at whatever resolution we eliminate all the digital artifacts we accidentally put it". This matters for both Hollywood movies, and for most TV shows.
Say you're watching a DVD source on a 4K screen. You interpolate to fill in the missing data, but that's more missing data than available data and the contrast is terrible. When your screen resolution is better than your source like this, you have to rely on little (but still visible) tricks like digital grain to make it look less unnatural (as they did relatively successfully with, say, the old A&E/BBC version of Pride & Prejudice, and less successfully with the movie 300. To avoid this entirely, you have to re-sample the original source at a higher rate, which means going back to a higher-resolution master. For older material that means film. For newer material, it may mean you're just SOL.
A case study: All the episodes of the original Star Trek were shot (including special effects), edited, and mastered on film. That master was broadcast using analog technology, or digitized to some resolution for DVDs, Blu-Ray, etc. When screen resolution goes up, you can't just upscale the DVD or Blu-Ray and get good results indefinitely: you have to go back to the master and re-capture a higher-resolution digital version from that. The resolution of 35mm film is roughly equivalent to 20 megapixels.
Most of the Next Generation was shot, edited, and mastered on film, but a few effects were produced and edited in using digital 3D. For those 3D models, they had to do some digital archaeology and re-creation to replace (not scale up) those effects without artifacts. And then you get to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, were a lot was modeled in 3D, and it was all edited and mastered digitally assuming the TV resolution of the time. There's no film master of higher resolution to go to, so DS9 (even the human actors) will just look worse and worse as the screen resolution goes up, forever.
Theoretically, 8K is approaching the point where you can good and truly digitally re-master most older media -- getting as good as you ever got with film -- and thus the point where the technology tops out... at least until Hollywood starts digitally filming in 16K.
People tended to hold onto them for as long as they were functional, which could be a decade or more. We had a 27" tube television which was 16 or so years old and still going strong when we replaced it with an HD set 10+ years ago (that old beast weighed something like 90 pounds too! I had a lot of fun hauling it away...).
And while Slashdotters are always more prone towards acquiring the new shiny toy, I suspect the average television owner still follows that principle... but the manufacturers keep trying (and generally failing) to induce people into treating their TVs as disposable gadgets which should be replaced every couple of years. 3D television was their first attempt; then 4K; now 8K. Meanwhile fewer people than ever are sitting down and staring at a television screen without also constantly texting on their phone or doing Facebook - it's doubtful they'd notice the increase in TV resolution even if they were a foot from the screen.
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