I don't understand the point of 4k

PiKe

PiKe

PiKe

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
25,287
Location
Lake District
I was in Curry's just having a look at the large 50 inch televisions and noticed that up close, you can't see the pixels on the 4k sets, but as soon as you move back to a normal viewing distance of 5 to 6 feet, 1080p and 4k are indistinguishable.

So to me, unless you have an 80 inch screen, what exactly is the point of 4k?
 
The human eye has a finite resolution, the benefits of 4k or UHD if that's what you want to call it, are not seen unless view a 50 inch TV under 5 feet away, and my eyes are fine thank you very much.

It's just comical to see people buying into 4k with screen sizes of 40 inches.
 
Watching a 4K demo on my 40" TV I can definitely see the benefit of 4K, but it's just a gimmick at the minute anyway. TV is still broadcast in SD never mind HD for most channels.
 
It's a qualitative issue, like looking at a printed page of 300 dpi text and a page of 600 dpi text at normal reading distance. You can't see the exact difference, but you can tell that the latter is much better.

But yes, until there's proper UHD media to display, it's a bit of a gimmick and a waste of money.
 
Bigger numbers mean more sales people are gulable. It's the same with cameras more mega pixels sell more cameras but does not mean better pictures.....
 
spoffle said:
It sounds like you need glasses. Also it's UHD, not 4K.
Click to expand...

^^^^^^^^

You need glasses...

I can easily notice the difference... I am greatly looking forward to 8k... from there on, I'm unsure if I will be able to tell the difference without excessive eye-corrective surgery.

As spoffle notes... 99% of displays on the market are actually "UHD" and not "4k"... they are UHD mis-advertised as 4k.

UHD = 3840x2160 pixels
4k = 4096x2160 pixels

It's a different aspect ratio and relevant... although you're average pair of eyes would struggle to tell the difference between 4K and UHD...







If you didn't see the difference between 1080p and 4K/UHD at such a short distance... the chance is that the retailer were only supplying a 1080p signal to all screens, 1080p & UHD... the reason you barely noticed any difference is because they were only using upscaling.
 
i've got better than 20/20 vision according to the opticians where i had a eye test because i suffer from migraines (now diagnosed as a sinus issue) so i didn't get tested because i thought i needed glasses if anything i will most likely never need them.

i've got a top 1080p panny plasma and i watched a top of the range 4k 65" sony set at a mates house which cost nearly 3 times what my tv did.

4k netflix amazon prime looked nothing special tbh, neither did gaming on ps4 or xb1. it was the size of the screen that made the biggest impression more than anything as well as the built in speakers.

then watched a full quality blu ray rip and it looked similar to the 4k streams you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

it was when he played the 4k demos he had downloaded (like a 30 second clip which was around 5 GB in size) that you saw what 4k really was and wow it was amazing.

here's the catch though, that was a demo and there is no real 4k content, so if he truly wanted to enjoy 4k he needs to watch samples of stuff or tech demos. his tv for the forseeable future will mainly use 4k streams and 1080p rips.

if it were me i would have bought the exact same tv 65" but in 1080p. 4k is pointless and will be for a long time imo unless you have a £2000 pc for 4k gaming.
 
PiKe said:
The human eye has a finite resolution, the benefits of 4k or UHD if that's what you want to call it, are not seen unless view a 50 inch TV under 5 feet away, and my eyes are fine thank you very much.

It's just comical to see people buying into 4k with screen sizes of 40 inches.
Click to expand...

Whilst the human eye is limited in the maximum resolution it can discern, UHD at 50" 5-6 feet away isn't high enough for that to be a factor.

If your eyes are fine, then you would have been able to see the pixels on a 50" UHD display up close, because they really aren't that small.

I need glasses to see the difference (because I'm short sighted) so it wasn't a slight. It's just that 90 pixels per inch isn't so high that you can't see any difference bar it being right in front of you. Not being able to see the pixels themselves isn't even an indicator of not being able to resolve more details either.

If your eyes are actually fine, then it would have been their demo feed they had running, rather than the display.
 
spoffle said:
If your eyes are actually fine, then it would have been their demo feed they had running, rather than the display.
Click to expand...

This - didn't have time to investigate it proper but was in a shop that a friend works for the other day looking at the curved and 4K TVs and the demo was somehow being downsampled/output at 1080p, though it looked slightly better on the higher resolution displays it wasn't actually being rendered with its original resolution and none of the staff knew how to set it up properly.
 
Ignoring the eyes thing you are correct that 4k TV's are currently pointless unless you don't mind watching 4k Netflix streams over and over that you aren't sure actually look better or just imagining things.
 
Next year it will gain popularity with UHD Blu-Ray. Expensive hobby it will be though.

Meeting the full HDR standard could turn out to be just as important.
 
It's a bit ironic that the vast majority of people haven't ever seen 1080p done properly; and the chances are they probably never will. Yet the race is on to buy the next shiny bauble that manufacturers are dangling in front of customers, and with it comes the inevitable "race to the bottom" for price and quality.

Placebo is a word that gets mentioned a lot in other areas of this industry, but not so often with display equipment. Throw in a bigger screen or some fancy words describing picture processing that in most cases makes things worse and people seem to fall over themselves to believe they have 'better'. I'm reminded of all those times I heard or read about folk waxing lyrical how their 1080p scaling DVD players made everything HD lol. Pointing out that they were still playing a DVD didn't seem to compute. What was the line from Spinal Tap? "Yeah, but this one goes up to 11. That's 1 more, isn't it"

4K does have more resolution so there is something quantifiable, and with that comes the ability to render finer levels of detail as long as the source signal contains it. But this is only one facet of the story, and it's an element where the benefit is lost quite quickly over distance. There are other things that can be done with a TV image that can be enjoyed at normal to long viewing distances and have benefits at all resolutions from 4K all the way down to terrestrial broadcast SD.

If the TV manufacturers had spent as much time and effort on proper picture calibration as they wasted on 3D and now 4K then there'd be even less of a quality step at the new higher resolution and we'd all be enjoying far better images as a result.
 
Until H265 is well supported by everything I own, I'm not touching it with a bargepole.

Filesizes are crazy.
 
When people are still watching compressed to hell streams that rarely even make 1080p I really struggle to see the point. Internet infrastructure is probably a decade away from being able to deliver stable, decent bitrate 4k streams to the masses, TV broadcasts are uniformly atrocious quality, and I don't buy physical media.

As long as the prices of 1080p OLED panels keep dropping, I'll be happy. I'll take PQ over pixels any day.
 
1080p is the sweet spot I feel. Often a high bit rate 720p rip can look better than a highly compressed 1080p rip.
SD to "HD" was a big step. I feel HD to UHD is not as relevant to the majority of consumers, especially given that SD broadcasts still dominate live TV. It will be the natural progression but it is years and years away.
 
I bought my UHD TV primarily for 2160p PC gaming. I've had it for a year now.

It's a 58" Panasonic AX802B. I 'upgraded' from a Panasonic 55" VT50 plasma, so I know what a decent 1080p image looks like.

Standard Def TV looks a lot worse on the 4k TV.
HD TV (Freesat) looks about the same...maybe slightly worse but not much in it.
Blu-rays...They look slightly better to me, but the Plasma was slightly more cinematic.

I was VERY sceptical about Netflix '4k' - As I think the bitrate is less than a 1080p Blu-ray? However, I very recently watched the opening episode of Breaking Bad, having previously watched it on Blu-ray and it did look quite noticeably better.

PC games look superb at 2160p, particularly vs my 1080p Plasma.

My Desktop monitor is a 27" 1440p and when possible (when games support SLI) I always try to use the 4k TV. Though the DPI is a lot worse, it just looks so good.
 
Once UHD bluray becomes widespread then you'd be crazy not to upgrade to UHD TV...
There's an enormous difference between 1080p and 2160p!
Just not the media for it yet...

I personally love my 2160p monitor and the content I've seen in proper UHD.. Looks amaze-balls! Leaves 1080p in its grainy dust... :D
 
Well we have a rather large cinema set up at work, put together by a collegue and I on a budget. We have been through four or five projectors in that time, two prior to HD. Back then the step up to 720p was noticable, I was using an older £3k InFocus LP350 projector with a VGA and DVI input, using a PC for 1080i and an EAD Theatervision P dvd player with VGA output, which was great back then, yet moved to a HD65 with a Denon DVD-1740 with HDMI output.

When we moved from Optoma HD65 720p to our 1st 1080p (HD25 I think), well it was noticeable, but not on all material at the distance we were projection, this was within a small cinema size system within an 80ft odd room, I think it's the HD141 we are using now.

I still have the HD65 at home, and when compared to my 1080p Plasma, I am still happy with the quality it provides via BluRay and Tivo, and with games consoles. And there is the crux, with the closure of Blockbusters we rent more online and watch more Virgin Media content, which simply is not up to decent 1080p quality, neither are games consoles. Yet with dvd and bluray via a bluray player, comparing 1080p versus 720p you need to be close and looking for the differences, which usually are not on your mind when simply enjoying a film on anything 80" and above.

The detail is improved, but in many cases easiy overlooked, or insignificant due to media quality, Netflix is not good quality, and as much as my next TV will most likely be a newer 4k UHD type model, it still feels like a waste when movies are still best on BluRay with a majority rented from TV broadband service providers such as Virgin Media and Sky who in my opinion do not offer true 1080p HD quality even with the latest film releases, as can be heard by the sound quality alone, some of these blockbuster films look appaling 10 months later when Virgin media clearly lower the quality, reminding me of 1st generation blocky dvd images.

People see a UHD TV and it's demo material and imediately think better, but the majority are still using Sky and Virgin media with an £80 Bluray player when they upgrade their old 1080p to these UHD TV's.

Through the years we had tangible upgrades, VHS to LD, LD to DVD (well with higher end DVD players), DVD to Bluray. Now we are buying UHD TV's and hoping they will improve our old 1080p and lower quality material because of the lack of UHD quality content and media players.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom