Consumer Technology Association sets official standard for 8K UHD TVs

No, no, no, I want more of a hardware and software upgrade than an external coating upgrade. I want technology that those dweebs who only make $300k per year cannot afford. I don't want, say in camera terms, a GH5 in diamond or alligator skin; more like an Arri with normal skin. Okay, so I want my phone to have fully realistic holographic videos for me to use when I'm...uhm, anyway. Then I want thermal vision so I can...uhm, anyway. Tech upgrades.
 
On a 75” 8K screen, From about 4ft away, i can no longer clearly perceive pixels.

With a 65” 4K screen i have to be about 5ft away.

With 60” HD and 2K screens, i have to be “normal” viewing distances.

With 60” HD pentile, i have to be at least 10ft away.

Just curious if anyone else has similar experience.
 
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James0b57 said:
Just curious if anyone else has similar experience.
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I've been on the R&D side of Optimal Viewing Distances for the better part of two decades and whipped up a useful tool you may find interesting:
http://phfx.com/tools/optimalViewing/

You can use that tool to plugin a screen size in diagonal and the screen resolution to get my own Window Effect Rating, Ideal Viewing Distance, Ideal Viewing Range, and the well known THX results as well.

The R&D on this dates back our experiments with THX and extends now modern display manufacturers who make display technologies of all sorts of sizes.

What it's really useful for is figuring out where in the room you want to sit or place a couch for a given screen size. There is individual distance variance across all different age groups, but this does a pretty good job taking all of that into account from all the tests.

When we started this research we were mainly focused on the theatrical experience. However, over the years this translated to televisions in particular when larger flat screen LCDs were an emerging trend. The last round of recent tests we did in the same room with the same viewing distances featured 1080p, UHD 4K, and UHD 8K 70" televisions. All content was color graded to match to make it squarely about resolution. Content features moving and static shots as well as graphics. We had people come in and make observations from the Ideal Viewing Distance and a few other positions. Personally on a 70" UHD 4K screen I can still see individual pixels, in fact most people can. It's a great test having them all side by side with the same content to truly reveal the differences between them all.
 
James0b57 said:
Just curious if anyone else has similar experience.
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Well, yes. But your data is rough.

On a 75” 8K screen, From about 4ft away, i can no longer clearly perceive pixels.
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112 pixels per degree.

With a 65” 4K screen i have to be about 5ft away.
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76 pixels per degree

With 60” HD and 2K screens, i have to be “normal” viewing distances.
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Too little data.

With 60” HD pentile, i have to be at least 10ft away.
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Too little data. There are a variety of pixel configurations that fall under the name Pentile. Even if I knew exactly which one you used, it would be hard to calculate, because the pixels are irregular.

Anyway, scientists say your eye's resolution is actually a lot higher: 128-200 pixels per degree. That's still a wide range. I conducted a test on myself and got around 180 pixels per degree. Some have calculated that the diffraction limit of the pupil should be about 150 pixels per degree. https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity

Let us take the highest number, 200. Then with that 75" 8K TV, you would have to sit 7'10" away for it to meet the limit of your eye. This would be an angle of view of 38.4°.

By "8K," I am going by the TV industry's spec: 7,680 x 4,320. I guess the DCI would say 8K should be 8,192.
 
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It is nice to hear that both Combat and Phil share similar experience of seeing pixels.

To me, it isn’t always about “resolution” or “sharpness”, as those are not important for a lot of movies and shows, but what ends up annoying me is seeing the pixels.

The upside to an 8K screen is that artist have more flexibility in the content they make. They are not tied to 2MP resolution, just because somebody says that it is enough for theatrical use. And yet, 2K should still look good on an 8K screen, maybe even better, as there might be some dithering that smooths out aliasing. We’ll see.
 
James0b57 said:
Greg_E may disagree with your use of the term “data”.
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I don't get the reference, but I was being a bit silly. If I sounded like a robot, that was my intention ;) You were only trying to give rough figures, and I wanted to talk about the absolute limit of the human eye.

James0b57 said:
The upside to an 8K screen is that artist have more flexibility in the content they make.
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If 8K TVs cost about the same as 4K, I don't think anyone cares that much. I think many, including me, would mind if everyone (Netflix, producers, clients, etc.) insisted that things be shot at 8K.

I said I did my own eye test and concluded that yes, I could tell a difference all the way up to 8K. And yet I continue to feel that 2K is good enough. Why? Because the differences at that league are subtler and subtler. It's not black and white.

30. Acceptable. At 30 pixels per degree, the resolution is no longer annoying. The average citizen can watch a movie and get immersed. This would be like a DVD projected onto a movie screen.

60. Nice. This is like a DVD in a decent living room set-up. Not a home theater, but you know the 50" TV about 10' from the couch, a coffee table in between.

90. Crisp. This is that same living room set-up, but with a Blu-ray instead of a DVD. At this point your average citizen would say this is retinal, even though it is just halfway to their eyes' maximum resolution. My theory is because this is the maximum of their brain's conscious resolution. If you are looking at all the little specks of details and trying to pick out, consciously, if you are at your limit, then this is about where you land (maybe even just 60). This is about the res that you find yourself if you walk back and forth from a TV screen to see where you think the detail disappears. This is where you landed, roughly, and where I did when I did similar tests.

120. Huh? I don't know what to label this level. It is like full 4K in a decent home-theater viewing angle (30°), which is even a decent real theater viewing angle (what's the difference, anyway ;). It sounds small, but 30° is way too intense for casual living room viewing, when you just want to flip through the channels. From a 50" TV it is 7'. In your field of view, the screen is dominant.

180. Physical Limit. You don't really see the difference, you feel it. My test to arrive at this number was this. I found a high-res image of a landscape, a lake actually, with leaves and other fine details. I made a copy of it at half the resolution. I created a web page that switched between the full-resolution and half-resolution every three seconds. I had to make a little dot at the bottom flash each time it switched, because I could not tell at a certain point, otherwise. I moved backward until I could not see, could not feel, a difference between the two images. At the last foot or two, I no longer knew, consciously, which was sharper. I could not consciously see any difference. But each time it flipped, I would ask myself, which one has an overall feeling of being sharper, or which one would I guess is sharper? I did not know which image was which, because I would close my eyes for several seconds so that I lost count of which image should be up at the time. I guessed correctly three times in a row, so I assumed there was something that my eyes were still seeing that my brain could not fully process, at least not on a conscious level. I don't think I could have arrived at such a fine resolution if I had done it by backing up and moving forward on a single image. Anyway, this matches up with scientific studies too of the human eye's limit (see links in my post, above).

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If around 180 pixels per degree is the physical limit, then why am I fine with 2K cameras? Because the difference in overall enjoyment is so small. Even though it is four times the resolution (16 times the pixels) my enjoyment goes from a 9 to a 9.5, maybe. I mean, we're talking a subliminal difference, literally --- which I don't want to discount, but is it worth dealing with all that data? And is it worth the sacrifice in dynamic range or global shutter? (I think global shutter "costs" about 2-3 stops. So you could have an 8K sensor, or you could have 4K with about the same dynamic range and global shutter, I would guess)

35mm release prints were only about 1.5K, because they were a few copies away from the original negative. Given an average angle of view in a movie theater of 30-40°, this was 40-50 pixels per degree.
 
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Combat, thanks for sharing your testing experience.

I am talking about the physical pixels on the screen, and not the digital pixels of content, so looking at actual TV’s side by side is more important.

From most real world viewing distances, i can see pixels on HD tv sets. With 4K, those pixels mostly disappear, but from some distances, i can see the aliasing of text curves.

Enter 8K displays, and all of those issues go away. I’ll still enjoy watching 2K content, but now i don’t have to see pixels. Instead, the 2K content will be spread across several pixels and dithered so slightly, almost making 2K even better.

Additionally, there would be enough extra resolution to make it worth while to view pictures in portrait mode even. Anyone remember trying to view vertical photos on your old HDTV?

Combat, i don’t have any issue with all the tests and perceptions and physical limits etc, i just disliked seeing pixels. And i always thought, if we spend so much on a big screen that as you get closer the illusion falls apart, wouldn’t it be better if as you got closer, you would just see more of the image.
 
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combatentropy said:
Right. I see nothing wrong with that. I just hope that after 8K TVs become commonplace, producers share your attitude.
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What kind of crazy people do you work for?

We currently are forced to admit that a 2K alexa does fiction better in many cases. 8K just enhances that truth.

If anyone says they need more resolution, i say, it’s called editing. You want the audience to see more detail cut to a close up! The audience isn’t going to get out of their chair to go in for an emotional close up either. That just isn’t how modern film making works.
 
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All I know is I'm sitting right in front of a 27" 4k computer monitor and can't see any pixels. This is with a computer UI not moving video. Moving video shot with a OLPF or bayer sensor which is going to naturally be softer than a computer UI anyway. Granted this is only 27" but it fits a majority of my view for how close I am sitting and I don't sit twice as far back from a 55" either to make anything higher than 4k make sense. If I am roughly two feet from my 27" right now I would need to be four feet from my 55" and I never sit that close. I almost went with a 32" monitor or even a 43" TV to use as a monitor but I realized my head would move around too much. A dual monitor setup works when I'm ok moving my head to see different panels and applications but not when watching a movie. There is such a thing as too close and I'm perfectly ok not having that much resolution or just another excuse for my daughter to stand right in front of the TV. How damaging is it to our eyes to watch a TV that close?

The ironic thing about this whole 8k thing is how many shooters today can't focus at all and still insist on drifting every shot out of focus. 8k blurry is still blurry. Good luck manually hitting 8k focus as well without at the very least a external 4k monitor. Even then a lot of shots may be slightly off.
 
Thomas Smet said:
All I know is I'm sitting right in front of a 27" 4k computer monitor and can't see any pixels. This is with a computer UI not moving video. Moving video shot with a OLPF or bayer sensor which is going to naturally be softer than a computer UI anyway. Granted this is only 27" but it fits a majority of my view for how close I am sitting and I don't sit twice as far back from a 55" either to make anything higher than 4k make sense. If I am roughly two feet from my 27" right now I would need to be four feet from my 55" and I never sit that close. I almost went with a 32" monitor or even a 43" TV to use as a monitor but I realized my head would move around too much. A dual monitor setup works when I'm ok moving my head to see different panels and applications but not when watching a movie. There is such a thing as too close and I'm perfectly ok not having that much resolution or just another excuse for my daughter to stand right in front of the TV. How damaging is it to our eyes to watch a TV that close?

The ironic thing about this whole 8k thing is how many shooters today can't focus at all and still insist on drifting every shot out of focus. 8k blurry is still blurry. Good luck manually hitting 8k focus as well without at the very least a external 4k monitor. Even then a lot of shots may be slightly off.
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Good point. Most 4K cameras only have a 1080 EVF and or screen, which is bad enough as it is.
 
puredrifting said:
Good point. Most 4K cameras only have a 1080 EVF and or screen, which is bad enough as it is.
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And with 1080 cameras, a lot of times we had EVF's that weren't even that. We were also using field monitors that weren't even close to HD, either. I don't know how many interviews I shot with the F900 and the Panasonic BT-LH900A that was only 1024x768, which ended up being even less than that after it letterboxed the incoming HD signal to fit the 4:3 screen.
 
I think we're always going to need something like focus peaking.

Even more so if, instead of a viewfinder, you're using the flip-out screen. It takes up such a small portion of your field of view, that your eye's resolution would be too low to judge focus, even if the screen matched the sensor's resolution.
 
no one will see if the focus is off, we can’t see better than 2K.
 
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