Nate Weaver
Veteran
I'm a bad guy. Along with my Xmas shopping, I gave in to 2 years of thought, comparison shopping, and gear lust, I bought an open box Sony 4K TV. XBR-55900B, to be exact. Midline/highline, with most of the Sony picture quality tricks, but without the biggest trick, local screen dimming to get the best blacks an LCD panel would be capable of.
For the last 24 hours, I've been driving my wife nuts by canvassing all of the 4K Netflix and Youtube content I can find. Which, btw, is all over the map in terms of quality and rubber-to-the-road resolution.
I want to stress that these points are MY take-away conclusions. I would encourage anybody reading to make their own conclusions when the opportunity arises, but with the understanding that you should screen as much 4K as you can get your hands on.
I've come to a few new opinions about 4K, some of them are very surprising to myself. I'll try to order these in order of least-controversial to more controversial:
1-4K content is all over the map in quality. Likely not a surprise to most here. Lenses, camera, etc make a huge difference in end result. Add to those factors compression quality, both in-camera and delivery. But it doesn't stop there, from what I can tell 4K telecine quality and even the quality of the print that was 4K scanned makes a huge difference.
To wit: Netflix has a few film originated 4K movies up for viewing. "Philadelphia", "Hitch", "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" are there and more. Philadelphia in particular looks like it was scanned from at the very least an exhibition print, and maybe even something worse than that. End resolution looks more like what I think most here would expect from 720p, and maybe not even that. But the grain itself is rendered at something higher. Of the film originated material, maybe Crouching Tiger looks best.
2-4K is all about viewing distance. Again, this should not be news. But it bears repeating as more and more of us get into 4K shooting and delivery, and subsequently deal with client expectations. If you're not sitting close enough to a 4K display, it's going to be lost.
3-The extra pixels help every picture Getting into bigger surprises, having more display pixels even for 1080p material, helps an awful lot. Smaller black channels between the (smaller) display pixels makes for a nicer picture. There's a corollary to this. 4K container rasters and bitrates for consumer 1080p delivery is going to fool a LOT of people for genuine 4K content. Even Netflix 1080p on a 4K display looks like "4K" compared to the low bitrates of my Uverse 1080p. It's drastic. Just upping the bitrate to pro rates and putting on display with higher pixel count makes a HUGE difference.
4-Alexa in 1080p (and other high-quality 1080p cams), from a high-bitrate source, given average viewing conditions, will fool people for 4K. This is my biggest surprise. Watching Skyfall on Netflix at highest bitrate, at what I'd call sub-optimal 4K viewing distance, looks as nice as some of the highest quality 4K I've seen. When I saw "sub-optimal 4K viewing distance", I'm referring to this distance that is far enough away that 4K is not resolved by a person with 20/15 eyesight, but still within 1080p resolvable distance. For a 55" set, in my own home, this is a viewing distance of about 9-10ft.
There is a simple reason I'm going into this.
There is an awful lot of discussion of which cameras are achieving "real" 4K, which are not, which are cheating, which are oversampled, and etc. I myself have been concerned with numbers and the future, because I am moving from 55 to Amira, and one of the biggest questions on my mind has been will the absence of "real" 4K be a problem say, in 3 years, when 4K is much more in use.
So my conclusions are this:
Consumer 4K, I expect, and in my opinion, crosses a line of human visual acuity and individual perception that will be MUCH more influenced by the quality of post production and delivery bitrates than any HD format that came before it.
The difference between 480i and 720P? Huge. Large. Difference between 720P and 1080P? Some people still argue they can't see the difference, although I think most here would say they can easily.
The difference between GOOD, HQ, high-bitrate 1080p and 4K? My eyes are telling me the distinction is going to get lost in lies, half-truths, bad eyesight, and delivery channels cutting corners (or not). But on the consumer end, 4K is always going to look better because at the end of the day, it's 4 times the pixels and the data rate and encode method (HEVC h265) are going to look much, much better. But that makes it easier for us on the creation side. F3 or GH4 encoded to 4K and broadcast is going to look way better than anything most of us are looking at now.
Just one single anecdotal data point: After watching high bitrate 1080p "Skyfall" against the best 4K content I could find, I am not longer, even for a second, concerned about 3.2K upscaled to 3.8K UHD being an issue. More to the interest of the group here, F55 4K is going to have a long life ahead of itself, I think!
For the last 24 hours, I've been driving my wife nuts by canvassing all of the 4K Netflix and Youtube content I can find. Which, btw, is all over the map in terms of quality and rubber-to-the-road resolution.
I want to stress that these points are MY take-away conclusions. I would encourage anybody reading to make their own conclusions when the opportunity arises, but with the understanding that you should screen as much 4K as you can get your hands on.
I've come to a few new opinions about 4K, some of them are very surprising to myself. I'll try to order these in order of least-controversial to more controversial:
1-4K content is all over the map in quality. Likely not a surprise to most here. Lenses, camera, etc make a huge difference in end result. Add to those factors compression quality, both in-camera and delivery. But it doesn't stop there, from what I can tell 4K telecine quality and even the quality of the print that was 4K scanned makes a huge difference.
To wit: Netflix has a few film originated 4K movies up for viewing. "Philadelphia", "Hitch", "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" are there and more. Philadelphia in particular looks like it was scanned from at the very least an exhibition print, and maybe even something worse than that. End resolution looks more like what I think most here would expect from 720p, and maybe not even that. But the grain itself is rendered at something higher. Of the film originated material, maybe Crouching Tiger looks best.
2-4K is all about viewing distance. Again, this should not be news. But it bears repeating as more and more of us get into 4K shooting and delivery, and subsequently deal with client expectations. If you're not sitting close enough to a 4K display, it's going to be lost.
3-The extra pixels help every picture Getting into bigger surprises, having more display pixels even for 1080p material, helps an awful lot. Smaller black channels between the (smaller) display pixels makes for a nicer picture. There's a corollary to this. 4K container rasters and bitrates for consumer 1080p delivery is going to fool a LOT of people for genuine 4K content. Even Netflix 1080p on a 4K display looks like "4K" compared to the low bitrates of my Uverse 1080p. It's drastic. Just upping the bitrate to pro rates and putting on display with higher pixel count makes a HUGE difference.
4-Alexa in 1080p (and other high-quality 1080p cams), from a high-bitrate source, given average viewing conditions, will fool people for 4K. This is my biggest surprise. Watching Skyfall on Netflix at highest bitrate, at what I'd call sub-optimal 4K viewing distance, looks as nice as some of the highest quality 4K I've seen. When I saw "sub-optimal 4K viewing distance", I'm referring to this distance that is far enough away that 4K is not resolved by a person with 20/15 eyesight, but still within 1080p resolvable distance. For a 55" set, in my own home, this is a viewing distance of about 9-10ft.
There is a simple reason I'm going into this.
There is an awful lot of discussion of which cameras are achieving "real" 4K, which are not, which are cheating, which are oversampled, and etc. I myself have been concerned with numbers and the future, because I am moving from 55 to Amira, and one of the biggest questions on my mind has been will the absence of "real" 4K be a problem say, in 3 years, when 4K is much more in use.
So my conclusions are this:
Consumer 4K, I expect, and in my opinion, crosses a line of human visual acuity and individual perception that will be MUCH more influenced by the quality of post production and delivery bitrates than any HD format that came before it.
The difference between 480i and 720P? Huge. Large. Difference between 720P and 1080P? Some people still argue they can't see the difference, although I think most here would say they can easily.
The difference between GOOD, HQ, high-bitrate 1080p and 4K? My eyes are telling me the distinction is going to get lost in lies, half-truths, bad eyesight, and delivery channels cutting corners (or not). But on the consumer end, 4K is always going to look better because at the end of the day, it's 4 times the pixels and the data rate and encode method (HEVC h265) are going to look much, much better. But that makes it easier for us on the creation side. F3 or GH4 encoded to 4K and broadcast is going to look way better than anything most of us are looking at now.
Just one single anecdotal data point: After watching high bitrate 1080p "Skyfall" against the best 4K content I could find, I am not longer, even for a second, concerned about 3.2K upscaled to 3.8K UHD being an issue. More to the interest of the group here, F55 4K is going to have a long life ahead of itself, I think!
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