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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.
The density race is pretty pointless as far as TVs on the wall go, but it has made for better monitors. I'm happy to have a 39" 4K monitor for a few hundred dollars, and I wouldn't have it if TV technology stagnated at 1080p.
This entirely misses the point of 8k. It's not just a resolution bump, it addresses multiple use-cases:
There is no "use-case" of sufficient utility to provide value to the vast majority of consumers in the market.
- Very large screens / projectors
Very large as in IMAX large.
Most movie theatres are still running 2k and nobody cares. Heck most movies are not even filmed in 4k.
- 120Hz native for ultra smooth, realistic motion
Most movies are currently filmed at 24 fps. IMAX runs at 48 fps.
Why stop at 120Hz? Why not 240Hz for even better smoother more ultraer, realistic motion? Or even 480Hz?
- Much higher dynamic range and more accurate colour rendering
- Comfortably exceeding the capabilities of your eyes in all situations
4k already does. It's overkill for most users.
8k is supposed to be the ultimate, the final form of 2D television. NHK, the people behind it, skipped over 4k because it's just a stepping stone to perfection. If anything is to blame here, it's 4k being a half measure and 8k not arriving quickly enough.
When you put things into perspective you quickly come to realize resolution of TV is irrelevant.
The limit of human vision useful for discriminating useful detail is 10 degrees of arc at a resolution of 60 pixels per degree or 600 x 600 per eye. Anything much more than that is unnecessary assuming 100% efficiency of projecting photons into the fovea.
A 80" 4k screen at 5 feet distance already exceeds the limit of human vision at 64 PPD as well as most peoples budgets for TVs or place to put them to say nothing of natural unwillingness to sit so close.
Actual current real world problem with TV that people will actually benefit from addressing is not resolution or frames per second or color depth. It's the willingness of content distributors to provide sufficient bandwidth to drive current displays.. displays that have been available commercially for the last decade.. at quality they are capable of producing.
The largest national cable companies have in recent years *DOWNGRADED* HD broadcasts from 1080 to 720 (excluding local retransmission) and turned up the compression knob leaving very noticeable blocking and motion artifacts in order to maximize profit. Satellite TV broadcasts are a joke and even OTA is starting to degrade as broadcasters are able to cram more content into available bandwidth via sub channels. Internet streaming has the advantage of modern and more rapidly upgradable codecs yet still insufficient bandwidth to practically deliver at quality limit of current generation of televisions. It isn't cost effective and more importantly most people either don't care enough to affect market behavior or can't tell the difference.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for content or a delivery mechanism to meet the capabilities of displays having been commercially available for more than 10 years let alone 4k and 8k.
8k is the equivalent resolution of 36 720p displays the max currently broadcast by major US cable companies. If people are willing to accept 720p with heavy compression on what planet is a broadcaster going to make the calculus ... hey we should use the bandwidth we would normally transmit to 36 users over point-point or 36 channels over broadcast medium just to deliver a single 8k channel to the handful of people who would appreciate it. How does THAT generate profit?
My own opinion is VR/AR/display/lightfield/GPU technology is likely to advance far faster in the next decades with far better results vs the likelihood of bandwidth requirements for transmission being rendered trivial.