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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.
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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