I'm waiting for 4K fad to fade in favor of 8K

Jim Ritscher said:
The way I read the above table for UHD is this: This is the distance you should sit if you want to be dazzled by the pixels and have a “wraparound wide-angle experience.” Or, this is the distance you should sit if you want to justify your paying for UHD. But who sits 4 feet away from a 60 inch TV?
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I think you read it right but, before I got my new glasses, I sat closely enough to my 55" that I could touch it with my toes. And I am no Wilt Chamberlain.

In any case, if you walk over to the TV section at your Best Buy, you will see them running 4K and 2K videos simultaneously on a bunch of 4K and 2K TV's. If you can't tell them apart from your normal home viewing distance, then you will get no benefit from the increased resolution and may as well buy a 1080p OLED set from LG. Personally, I could easily spot the difference on even smaller 42"-50" sets from quite a ways. There's something to be said about the new prescription!
 
Jim Ritscher said:
The way I read the above table for UHD is this: This is the distance you should sit if you want to be dazzled by the pixels and have a “wraparound wide-angle experience.” Or, this is the distance you should sit if you want to justify your paying for UHD. But who sits 4 feet away from a 60 inch TV?
Click to expand...
The science behind the table is it assumes that the limit of human vision is 1 minute of arc, and in practice that's very close to reality for nearly everybody (assuming any sight defects are properly corrected by glasses if necessary). In other words, the human eye should JUST be able to distinguish 60 lines within a 1 degree field of vision. (The reason it varies very little between people is that it's determined by the size of the eyeball and the size of cells within it - which varies little person-person.)

Hence, for 1080 horizontal lines, the human eye should still (just) be able to distinguish such if they subtend an angle of 1080/60=18 degrees. I'd heard that the typical viewing distance in a UK home is about 9 feet, so by trigonometry that corresponds to a screen height of just under 3 feet, and hence a diagonal of somewhere around 65". If the screen resolution is any better, the human eye just won't be able to discern the improvement - not without getting closer, anyway!

So put another way, unless in an average home you are either going to have a screen bigger than 65" and/or sit closer than 9 feet to it, you won't be able to see any discernible difference for better than 1080p system resolution. That's why 1080p is considered "good enough" at the moment for nearly all broadcast to home television. The next question is whether screens will get larger, or whether people will start sitting considerably closer? About 10 years ago the EBU was using the same calculations to advise that 720p was likely to be "good enough" for those reasons, so it's wise to be cautious! But they were assuming that screen sizes were unlikely to be much more than about 32" for quite a while - they didn't appreciate how quickly flat panel manufacturing was going to mature, and almost before the conclusions were published 42" was becoming quite common.

But can we now extrapolate in the same way? Personally I doubt it. Not for technical reasons, but for practical ones - just how big a screen do people want in their rooms anyway? I have 42" at the moment, would be happy with 50", may stretch to 55" - but think 65" would simply be overpowering. So do we need more than 1080p?

The above aside, I do think 4K may be valid for niche channels, let alone cinema. But assuming the same 9 foot viewing distance, it then becomes "enough" until a screen size of about 120" (!) - nobody will notice any improvement until you get bigger than that. And since a 120" screen is already taking up most of an average wall......??

So that's why I see little point in general 8K, or 8K as a broadcast standard for normal home viewing. But as said before, that's not to say it won't find a very important niche market in many areas, and surveillance is maybe the most obvious.
 
I thought we were done justifying resolutions. The real head ache was switching from analog interlaced 4:3 to digital progressive 16:9. Jumping resolutions is the easy part.
 
So, I go on YouTube last night to see if I can find a certain song I like in its best quality upload. A few steps later, I stumble onto a Deep Purple concert from last summer. It's a bootleg. It's in 4K. OK, it's handheld jittery, probably off a smartphone ... but it's in 4K. A bootleg in 4K. Holy Toledo.
 
My D800e is an 8k camera. A single losslessly compressed raw image is about 40-50MB, at 25fps that's 1GB per second... including a single backup for redundancy, that's over 7TB per hour of footage.

Given that I can barely get any takers to shoot even compressed 4k raw at current storage costs - I think it's going to be quite some time before we see 8K taking hold anywhere but Japan, South Korea, and at the absolute highest levels of sport and motion picture production.

What I'm looking forward to is vector-based image capture - no Ks, and infinitely scalable!
 
I remember when HD first came and it was so compressed(HDV at 20:1) because our Pentium 3 computers couldn't handle the larger file sizes.
 
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