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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.
8k is supposed to be the ultimate, the final form of 2D television.
Son, who are you kidding?
Joe Sixpack knows it, marketing knows it: higher is better
I predict 16k devices in 3...2...1...
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
You sound like an audiophile that think people can hear 96KHz/24bit audio. People don't even notice that cinema movies create less than 4K masters and blow them up on screens the size of a wall. And that most movies are shot in 24p because people want them to be. The biggest shortcoming of current screens is the contrast level and backlight bleeding, if you could get a screen that went from max HDR to perfect black that would be the biggest improvement. The second biggest improvement is color and there rec. 2020 is just huge compared to rec. 709, bigger than even reference monitors can provide. And despite stretching it for HDR the granularity of 10 bit color over 8 bit is also pretty huge. Oh yes and also the color volume, being able to do not only intense whiteness but also intense color.
Basically, if people saw a well-mastered 4K BluRay on a laser projector (which is as close as we get to a "perfect" image right now) I doubt anyone would care about 8K/12bit/120fps. The problems we have are far more mundane. And that goes doubly so for OTA broadcast, streaming or other bandwidth limited media. Personally I'm hoping for the "real" electroluminescent QLEDs to steal the show, not Samsung's latest quantum dot-enhanced LCDs but OLED-style perfect contrast with LED intensity and QD color accuracy. The first working early prototype was shown in May, at least a few more years out.
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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.
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.
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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