4K TV Article

Mark Williams

Mark Williams

Veteran
Interesting article on 4K TVs. Apparently they have surpassed the limits of human vision. "And consumers will soon realize that they aren't seeing much, if any, visual resolution and sharpness improvements," Soneira continued. The sets will likely be better than today's in other ways, he noted, "but the higher pixel count will not be the reason."
 
Very much depends on the display and your viewing distance from it.

The calibrated 4k displays i saw playing good 4k content blow normal hd out of the water.
 
The problem with current LED displays is contrast ratio. The human eye is much better at detecting contrast than fine details. 4k OLED will make the resolution difference much more obvious.
 
That's funny… I went past a tv store this weekend and noticed the Samsung 4K tv….

Now while I would NEVER pay that ridiculous amount of money for something that lives in the world of planned obsolescence, I most definitely could see the difference from HD.

How did they carry out the test?

To be honest they could only make it like this:

- Show HD content on an HD tv

and compare that to

- 4K content on a 4K tv.

Anything else than that would kill the survey, but I guess some people appreciate the bias towards the old because it's too expensive and too much work transitioning to 4K.
 
Saw one this weekend as well. Yeah if you walk right up to it you clearly see a difference but who the heck watches a 60" TV from six inches away?

The realty of testing a TV is to test it from. A normal viewing distance. In those cases it becomes almost impossible to tell the difference and ends up having little to no benefit.

Movies will likely not see any benefit either. Any movie through history shot on film or worked on at 2k will not see any advantage. That is pretty much every single movie in existence.

A 4k computer monitor makes sense since people tend to sit inches away from the screen. A TV that will sit six to 12 feet away will likely never see an advantage.
 
Disagree entirely.

Watch an HD sourced video on an HD TV at normal distance and a similar-sized 4k TV with 4k content at the same distance.

If you can't see the difference, well then I can't help you.
 
Thomas Smet said:
Saw one this weekend as well. Yeah if you walk right up to it you clearly see a difference but who the heck watches a 60" TV from six inches away?

The realty of testing a TV is to test it from. A normal viewing distance. In those cases it becomes almost impossible to tell the difference and ends up having little to no benefit.

Movies will likely not see any benefit either. Any movie through history shot on film or worked on at 2k will not see any advantage. That is pretty much every single movie in existence.

A 4k computer monitor makes sense since people tend to sit inches away from the screen. A TV that will sit six to 12 feet away will likely never see an advantage.
Click to expand...

+1

Circle of confusion renders most of the benefits that 4K offers for display, obsolete (acquisition is another matter). It's why I could never quite understand the hyperbole that surrounded 4K projection - yes it looks INCREDIBLE in a small screening room sitting a few meters away from a screen 3-5m across, in that scenario you see a level of detail that you've never seen in a projected image before. However switch out that small screening room for a conventional cinema and the differences become almost unnoticeable unless you're sitting in the front half of the cinema.

And this isn't just a film/tv thing, the exact same thing applies to any displayed image - from photographs to billboards, the distance of your eyes relative to the size and resolution of the image plays a massive part in just how much detail you can actually detect in an image.

The bigger problem with 4K is that you have to convince people that have forked out thousands for their big HD TVs in the past few years to fork out more for screens that barely even have any methods of accessing and displaying the higher-resolution footage they're capable of showing.
 
Thomas Smet said:
Saw one this weekend as well. Yeah if you walk right up to it you clearly see a difference but who the heck watches a 60" TV from six inches away?

The realty of testing a TV is to test it from. A normal viewing distance. In those cases it becomes almost impossible to tell the difference and ends up having little to no benefit.

Movies will likely not see any benefit either. Any movie through history shot on film or worked on at 2k will not see any advantage. That is pretty much every single movie in existence.

A 4k computer monitor makes sense since people tend to sit inches away from the screen. A TV that will sit six to 12 feet away will likely never see an advantage.
Click to expand...


If the movie was shot on film you can easily scan it to 6K….. so that wont be a problem. But yeah, if you shot a digital movie on 2K…. tough luck.
 
The bigger problem with 4K is that you have to convince people that have forked out thousands for their big HD TVs in the past few years to fork out more for screens that barely even have any methods of accessing and displaying the higher-resolution footage they're capable of showing.
Click to expand...

+1

I'm reminded of what Barry Green said on here once. (I think it was Barry). Consumers tend to buy more for the convenience. 3D tv, having to wear glasses to see and pay more for the blu ray disks, not so convenient. Flat screen tv's that offer a screen 2-5 times larger than tube tvs and hangs on your wall - that's convenience. A 4k tv that is offers same size and thin enough to hang on wall but more expensive due to the increased resolution - not as convenient because it costs way more (right now anyways) for what most consumers will say as a minimal increased benefit.
 
I walked into a Best Buy to see their 4K TV setup right next to a same sized HD setup and I could not tell the difference from an average viewing distance. If I walked up to it there was definitely a difference, but from 7 feet away I could not see a difference.

That said, the other BB employees standing around looking at it were amazed by it and four things entered into my head:

1. I have bad vision compared to them (even though my vision is 20/20 uncorrected)

2. They were experiencing a placebo effect and if I did a blind test where I put them behind a rope at 7-8 feet away and told them the HD TV was 4K they would say that was amazing.

3. They were trying to sell me on it (being BB employees) by talking about their amazement with it. Hoping I would blindly accept it was better just based on their reactions.

4. Their amazement was founded purely on the moments where they walked up close to the screen, so even when they backed up they still had that close-up reaction in their head.
 
Go back to the theater and watch any of the many hollywood feature films shot today with an Alexa. That's 2k (close to regular HD) being shown on a 4k screen and tell me it would look better had it been shot in 4k. It's more than resolution.
 
You don't even need a 4K screen to check if you can see the difference or not. Get your regular 1920x1080 screen, and toggle between 1080p and 720p images. At what distance are you unable to notice the difference?
With that, since your living room sets your eyes-to-screen image and target screen size, you can easily calculate if you'll be able to get any benefit from real 4K.
(you're very likely to cheat yourself, so, it's better if you can have someone else to toggle between the images)

For me: I have pretty good vision, and I know I can't see 4K unless I get a >100" screen
 
resolution_chart.png
 
mcgeedigital said:
Disagree entirely.

Watch an HD sourced video on an HD TV at normal distance and a similar-sized 4k TV with 4k content at the same distance.

If you can't see the difference, well then I can't help you.
Click to expand...

What is 'normal distance'? That, screen size, and of course your vision are all variables.
However, it is a scientific fact, that at certain screen sizes and distances, even someone
with perfect vision could not tell the difference. It's not hard to find the charts online
that can show you these screen sizes and distances so you can see when 4k becomes
beneficial. For my living room it's not going to make a difference....yours may be different.
 
roxics said:
I walked into a Best Buy to see their 4K TV setup right next .....
Click to expand...

I suggest you go to a Sony store, or higher end AV shop where they will have equipment setup correctly so that you will see the difference between 4k and regular HD. Knowing Best Buy they had a DVD signal split into both :thumbsup:
 
mcgeedigital said:
The calibrated 4k displays i saw playing good 4k content blow normal hd out of the water.
Click to expand...

Matt- curious what sort of content did they have? Both type (ie "test", "movie", etc) and kind of shots (fine detail leaves, panorama landscape, CGI, bikini babes, etc)

thanks!
 
I think it is a big question mark whether 4K will ever truly makes it way to consumers en masse as far as deliverable content is concerned. Beyond 4K I think it will be many, many years - if ever - a higher resolution is legitimately introduced

I have long felt that the resolution game would eventually hit a point where consumers no longer care or give a crap. If you look at what happened in the music industry, the parallels to me are strikingly similar. In the end, music consumers overwhelmingly choose to purchase compressed file format listened to on small earbuds or headphones. Convenience and portability in music has trumped higher sample rates and better fidelity. If they wanted to move to higher sample rates they could have moved to DVD's but they didn't because people have reached a point where the sound quality of music is good enough where it sits today.

I remember the first time watching a blu-ray disc on a hi-def television...I was simply blown away at the detail. I could see the make up on the actors, there was almost too much resolution. I didn't need any more definition. I am happy that there is a push towards 4K. I have seen a difference in the 4K sets I have seen, but I really beleive we are the point of diminishing returns and I don't think we are going to see another push for better resolution for a looooong time. I truly question whether consumers are going to see a big enough difference between 1080 to 4K for the new format to truly take hold.
 
I'm sooooooooo happy with 1920X1080 for both what I shoot and what I watch at home.

Really.....I feel like it took forever for HD to finally come to fruition when I heard about it in the early 90's. It took quite some time to become reality. And then lo & behold, it was available on prosumer cameras & DSLRs! (Slowly worked my way up starting with HDV) Anything I shoot & deliver in 1080 is good enough for my workflow and should be for the foreseeable future. My milage is probably well below most users on these boards who need that 4K. We all have different needs.

The argument was made in one of these threads for future-proofing stock footage. Fair enough, good point. I have plenty of useless SD stock footage and that's just from a few years ago.

I have long felt that the resolution game would eventually hit a point where consumers no longer care or give a crap.
Click to expand...
Ahhhhhhh, scratch what I said. I'm totally getting that $40,000 Samsung.
 
When I was working for a rather well known large format theatrical distribution company, we did side by side tests with 2K Christie projectors and 4K Sony projections, each with respective 2K and 4K DCPs. There was a difference but it's not as visually noticeable that consumers would really complain if they were used to seeing 4K projection, and had to go to another theater to watch the 2K system. This was a pretty thorough analysis by the top team.

In practical shooting, I find that I have more problems with soft focus for image clarity than worry about 2K vs 4K for image clarity and resolution. But don't get me wrong. There's so many benefits in post with 4K for VFX and re-cropping. 4K all the way! I love the progress.
 
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