Study Claims 4K/8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes

Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨artifex@piefed.social⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://hothardware.com/news/scientists-claims-4k-and-8k-tvs-arent-noticeably-better-than-hd-to-the-human-eye

A new study published in Nature by University of Cambridge researchers just dropped a pixelated bomb on the entire Ultra-HD market, but as anyone with myopia can tell you, if you take your glasses off, even SD still looks pretty good :)

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fritobugger2017@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
The study used a 44 inch TV at 2.5m. The most commonly used calculator for minimum TV to distance says that at 2.5m the TV should be a least 60 inches.

My own informal tests at home with a 65 inch TV looking at 1080 versus 4K Remux of the same movie seems to go along with the distance calculator. At the appropriate distance or nearer I can see a difference if I am viewing critically (as opposed to casually). Beyond a certain distance the difference is not apparent.

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- markko@lemmy.world ⁨53⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Exactly. This title is just clickbait.
  
  The actual study’s title is “Resolution limit of the eye — how many pixels can we see?”.
  
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TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Kind of a tangent, but properly encoded 1080p video with a decent bitrate actually looks pretty damn good.

A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.

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- Feyd@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yeah I’d way rather have higher bitrate 1080 than 4k. Seeing striping in big dark or light spots on the screen is infuriating
  
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  - acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    i’d rather have proper 4k.
    
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  - bdonvr@thelemmy.club ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    For most streaming? Yeah.
    
    Give me a good 4k Blu-ray though. High bitrate 4k
    
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- woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.
  
  YouTube is locking the good bitrates behind the premium paywall and even as a premium users you don’t get to select a high bitrate when the source video was low res.
  
  That’s why videos should be upscaled before upload to force YouTube into offering high bitrate options at all. A good upscaler produces better results than simply stretching low-res videos.
  
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- notfromhere@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I can still find 480p videos from when YouTube first started that rival the quality of the compressed crap “1080p” we get from YouTube today. It’s outrageous.
  
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  - IronKrill@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Sadly most of those older YouTube videos have been run through multiple re-comoressions and look so much worse than they did at upload. It’s a major bummer.
    
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- deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  HEVC is damn efficient. I don’t even bother with HD because a 4K HDR encode around 5-10GB looks really good and streams well for my remote users.
  
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- someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I stream YouTube at 360p. Really don’t need much for that kind of video.
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    360p is awful, 720p is the sweet spot IMO.
    
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DarthAstrius@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Hard disagree. 4K is stunning, especially Samsung’s Neo-QLED. I cannot yet tell a difference between 4K and 8K, though.

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treesquid@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
4k is way better than 1080p, it’s not even a question. You can see that shit from a mile away. 8k is only better if your TV is comically large.

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- balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think you overestimate the quality of many humans’ eyes. Many people walk around with slightly bad vision no problem. Many older folks have bad vision even corrected. I cannot distinguish between 1080 and 4k in the majority of circumstances.
  
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  - Rooster326@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    And the size of most people’s TV versus how far away they are.
    
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  - MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I used to have 20/10 vision, this 20/20 BS my cataract surgeon says I have now sucks.
    
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- SereneSadie@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I can immediately tell when a game is running at 1080p on my 2K monitor (yeah, I’m not interested in 4K over higher refresh rate, so I’m picking the middle ground.)
  
  Its blatantly obvious when everything suddenly looks muddy and washed together.
  
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  - psycotica0@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    I think that’s relevant to the discussion though. Most people sit like two feet from their gaming monitor and lean forward in their chair to make the character go faster.
    
    But most people put a big TV on the other side of a boring white room, with a bare white ikea coffee table in between you and it, and I bet it doesn’t matter as much.
    
    I bet the closest people ever are to their TV is when they’re at the store buying it…
    
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etchinghillside@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
Shhh – the ISPs need a reason to sell bigger data plans. Please think of the ISPs…

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Hackworth@piefed.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Image

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- Credibly_Human@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Seriously, articles like this are just clickbait.
  
  They also ignore all sorts of usecases.
  
  Like for a desktop monitor, 4k is extremely noticeable vs even 1440P or 2k/1080P
  
  Unless you’re sitting very far away, the sharpness of text and therefore amount of readable information you can fit on the screen changes dramatically.
  
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  - Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Complete bullshit articles. The same thing happened when 720p became 1080p. So many echos of “oh you won’t see the difference unless the screen is huge”… like no, you can see the difference on a tiny screen.
    
    We’ll have these same bullshit arguments when 8k becomes the standard, and for every large upgrade from there.
    
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  - cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The article was about TVs, not computer monitors. Most people don’t sit nearly as close to a TV as they do a monitor.
    
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- ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  Would be a more useful graph if the y axis cut off at 10, less than a quarter of what it plots.
  
  Not sure what universe where discussing the merits of 480p at 45 ft is relevant, but it ain’t this one. If I’m sitting 8 ft away from my TV, I will notice the difference if my screen is over 60 inches, which is where a vast majority of consumers operate.
  
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- Lemming6969@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  People are legit sitting 15+ feet away and thinking a 55 inch TV is good enough… Optimal viewing angles for most reasonably sized rooms require a 100+ inch TV and 4k or better.
  
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- Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  So, a 55-inch TV, which is pretty much the smallest 4k TV you can get, has benefits over 1080p at a distance of 7.5 feet. And that is the smallest, and thus closest for the benefits… how far away do people watch their TVs from? Am I weird?
  
  And at the size of computer monitors, for the distance they are from your face, they would always have full benefit on this chart. And even working into 8k a decent amount.
  
  And that’s only for people with typical vision, for people with above-average acuity, the benefits would start further away.
  
  But yeah, for VR for sure, since having an 8k screen there would directly determine how far away a 4k screen can be properly re-created. If your headset is only 4k, a 4k screen in VR is only worth it when it takes up most of your field of view. That’s how I have mine set up, but I would imagine most people would prefer it to be half the size or half the distance away, or a combination.
  
  So 8k screens in VR will be very relevant for augmented reality, since performance costs there are pretty low anyway. And still convey benefits if you are running actual VR games at half the physical panel resolution due to performance demand being too high otherwise. You get some relatively free upscaling then. Won’t look as good as native 8k, but benefits a bit anyway.
  
  There is also fixed and dynamic foveated rendering to think about, with an 8k screen, even running only 10% of it at that resolution and 20% at 4k, 30% at 1080p, and the remaining 40% at 540p, even with the overhead of so many foveation steps, you’ll get a notable reduction in performance cost. Fixed foveated would likely need to lean higher towards bigger percentages of higher res, but has the performance advantage of not having to move around at all from frame to frame. Can benefit from more pre-planning and optimization.
  
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  - 4am@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    A lot of us mount a TV on the wall and watch from a couch across the room.
    
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  - Damage@feddit.it ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’ve got a LCD 55" TV and a 14" laptop. Ok the couch, the TV screen looks to me about as big as the laptop screen, and I’ve got perfect vision; on the laptop I can clearly see the difference between 4k and FULL HD, on the TV, not so much.
    
    I think TV screens aren’t as good as PC ones, but also the TVs’ image processors turn the 1080p files into better images than what computers do.
    
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- frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  There’s a giant TV at my gym that is mounted right in front of some of the equipment, so my face is inches away. It must have some insane resolution because everything is still as sharp as a standard LCD panel.
  
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- ubergeek@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Good to know that pretty much anything looks fine on my TV, at typical viewing distances.
  
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- frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The counterpoint is that if you’re sitting that close to a big TV, it’s going to fill your field of view to an uncomfortable degree.
  
  4k and higher is for small screens close up (desktop monitor), or very large screens in dedicated home theater spaces. The kind that would only fit in a McMansion, anyway.
  
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- SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  How many feet away is a computer monitor?
  
  Or a 2-4 person home theater distance that has good fov fill?
  
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4am@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Highly depends on screen size and viewing distance, but nothing reasonable for a normal home probably ever needs more than 8k for a high end setup, and 4K for most cases.

Contrast ratio/HDR and per-pixel backlighting type technology is where the real magic is happening.

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- MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Depends on your eyes quite a bit, too. If I’m sitting more than 15’ back from a 55" screen, 1080p is just fine. Put on my distance glasses and I might be able to tell the difference with 4K.
  
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Sauvandu60@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
i suspect screen size would make the difference. you won’t notice 4K or 8K on small screens.

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- CatAssTrophy@safest.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨minute⁩ ago
  It’s the ratio of screen size to distance from the screen. But typically you sit further from larger screens, so there’s an optimization problem in there somewhere.
  
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Baggie@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Honestly after using the steam deck (800p) I’m starting to wonder if res matters that much. Like I can definitely see the difference, but it’s not that big a deal? All I feel like I got out of my 4k monitor is lower frame rates.

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jjlinux@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This is so much bullshit. 4K does make a difference, specially if playing console games on a large TV (65" and up).

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- MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  If you’re sitting 3’ from the screen, sure. Even 8K is better, if your hardware can drive it.
  
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dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Sure but, hear me out, imagine having most of your project sourcecode on the screen at the same time without having to line-wrap.

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- CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’ve been using “cheap” 43" 4k TVs as my main monitor for over a decade now. I used to go purely with Hisense, they have great colour and PC text clarity, and I could get them most places for $250 CAD. But this year’s model they switched from RGB subpixel layout to BGR, which is tricky to get working cleanly on a computer, even when forcing a BGR layout in the OS. One trick is to just flip the TV upside down (yes it actually works) but it just made the whole physical setup awkward. I went with a Sony recently for significantly more, but the picture quality is fantastic.
  
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- DeadPixel@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  And then there’s the dev that still insists on limiting line to 80 chars & you have all that blank space to the side & have to scroll forever per file, sigh….
  
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  - treadful@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Split screen yo
    
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sturmblast@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
4k is perfectly fine for like 99% of people.

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- zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  4k is overkill for 99% of people
  
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- MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  640K of RAM is all anybody will ever need.
  
  1920x1080 is plenty, if the screen is under 50" and the viewer is more than 10’ away.
  
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Quazatron@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Sony Black Trinitron was peak TV.

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CCMan1701A@startrek.website ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
HDR 1080p is what most people can live with.

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deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If you read RTINGS before buying a TV and setting it up in your room, you already knew this. Screen size and distance to TV are important for determining what resolution you actually need.

Most people sit way too far away from their 4K TV.

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- 7U5K3N@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  My father in law loves to sit and research… that’s his thing… made a career out of it yadda yadda yadda…
  
  He asked me about a new TV… I was like…well have you seen rtings.com?
  
  My MIL had to remind him to eat… lmfao
  
  He just rabbit holed for days. It was like he clicked a TV tropes link or something.
  
  Anyway, he made a very informed decision and loves his TV. Haha
  
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- SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  People that have their tiny displays on the opposite side of a room is so funny to me. It’s a similar reaction I have to giant-guy tiny-car.
  
  I remember one time I saw a maybe 27 inch computer monitor on the wall above a fireplace and it was just like… I need to leave before I say something.
  
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  - PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Something like a dozen years ago I visited my father and sat 20+ feet away from his 27" television struggling to make things out. It was comically small for the room. I asked if he was interested in buying a newer and larger one. He agreed and we made the change to a 43". A modest increase and it helped quite a bit, though an even larger model would’ve been my choice. This satisfactorily infuriated his wife who then had to learn a new remote. Change is hard for some.
    
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  - kaitco@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Michael Scott vibes.
    
    “Brand New Plasma TV. Fits right into the wall.”
    
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  - Damage@feddit.it ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That’s how we watched TV in the CRT era
    
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- FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Or they buy an 80" TV to hang on the wall of their camper van.
  
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vortexal@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This is why I still use 768p as my preferred resolution, despite having displays that can go much higher. I hate that all TVs now are trying to go as big as possible, when it’s just artificially inflating the price for no real benefit. I also hate that modern displays aren’t as dynamic as what CRTs were. CRTs can handle pretty much any resolution you throw at them but modern TVs and monitors freak out if you don’t use an exact resolution, causing them to either have input lag because the display has to upscale the image or a potential performance hit if the display forces the connected device to handle the upscaling.

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Kowowow@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
with all the menus now days I mainly want sharp text

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Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This discussion drives me crazy because it’s the EXACT SAME FUCKING discussion that happened when 1080p screens became available in the 00s. So many people argued “oh it depends how far away you sit but you don’t really notice it” and “oh if the screen size is small your eyes can’t tell”

NO monthafucka if you have halfway decent eyesight there’s NO WAY you won’t notice a huge change in quality from 720p to 1080p even on a 6” screen. 1080 to 4k is noticeable on almost ANY size screen (we all just skip 1440p, don’t we?) and as the size of the screen goes up and up, it just gets more and more noticeable.

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- JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  And I’m sure most of those people were comparing VHS tapes or regular analog cable TV, or hooking up their DVD player with composite.
  
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  - Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I don’t doubt that for a second. It’s like in the early 2010s when tons of people on Reddit were like “30FPS is all you need, you don’t need more especially in a strategy game or RPG” and I’m seething because my neurospicy ass cannot handle the choppiness of 30FPS and they’ve probably never even seen 120, 144, 165FPS…
    
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- sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I don’t remember that discussion at all… I remember people being super excited for 1080p, but annoyed that there was no content for it because DVDs were still 480p and TV content was similar. Blurays were 1080p, but weren’t really a thing until the late 00s.
  
  We’ve had 4k for a decade, and there’s still not much content for it. When there is, the difference w/ 1080p isn’t so significant as to be worth the cost, as it’s usually just upscaled 1080 content. 4k makes a lot of sense for a monitor that’s 30" or larger, but for a TV where you’re 10 feet away it doesn’t make nearly as much sense.
  
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  - Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I forgot to mention, I sold TVs when 1080p was popularized and HD-DVD and Blu Ray came out hahaha. That’s mostly where I heard the “you can’t tell the difference between 720p and 1080” BS. There was plenty of 1080p stuff by the end of the ‘00s and people were still making that argument.
    
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- magguzu@midwest.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Diminishing returns.
  
  480 to 720 was massive, and 720 to 1080 was big too. 1080 to 4K is definitely not always noticeable and 8K is well beyond worth the file size.
  
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  - Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Agreed with 8k file size for now, but 1080p to 4k is still hugely noticeable to me.
    
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- iopq@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I cannot tell 4K because my TV is 50’’ and I sit three meters away
  
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wizzor@sopuli.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I can barely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. I will probably never buy another TV.

Maybe I need glasses?

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- Lumidaub@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I do wear glasses and I came here to post exactly your first sentence. There probably is a difference, sure, but I personally can’t see it unless I put both files next to each other and really try to see it.
  
  I’ve been digitising our movie collection so I played around with resolutions to minimise the storage space needed - I did settle on doing everything in 1080p but mostly because it feels weird to use a resolution the internet tells me is bad and I’m vulnerable to peer pressure (voice in the back of my head “oooh but what if anyone ever looks at those files?? What’ll they think???” type nonsense).
  
  I also had a few files that came in much higher resolution that I re-encoded to fractions of their file sizes and honestly same effect.
  
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_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This is highly dependent on screen size and viewing distance.

On a computer screen or a phone screen? No, it’s not really noticeable.

On a 120"+ projector screen? Yes, it is definitely noticeable.

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QBertReynolds@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
My desktop monitor is a 54" 4K TV that I sit about 3’ from. It’s somewhat difficult for me to pick out individual pixels even when I lean in. My living room TV is 70" 4K, but I sit 15’ away from it. There’s no way I could tell the difference in 4K and 1080 from pixel density alone. I can however tell the difference between 4K and 1080 streams because of how shitty low bitrates look. 4K streams crush all of the dark colors and leave you with these nasty banding effects that I don’t see as often on lower resolution streams.

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iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The difference between 1080p and 2160p is night and day to me.

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Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Given how much time I spend actually looking at the screen while the show/movie is on, it might as well be in ca. 2000 RealVideo 160x120 resolution.

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ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Isn’t it just a limitation of human vision? No matter how much resolution we can create, the human eye will only ever see a certain level of resolution … anything beyond that is imperceptible to us. I think I remember reading that 4K is the maximum we can realistically appreciate and anything beyond that is impractical because no one would ever notice the difference.

The only way higher resolutions work is if you start blowing up the size of the image itself. A 20" wide image at 720p looks good but the same image blow up to 60" becomes noticeably pixelated. A 20" wide image at 8K looks sharp and blown up to 60", it still looks sharp.

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SculptusPoe@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
8k is a little high. I feel like 4k is a significant change, especially if you use your screen as a computer monitor.

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SpacePirate@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If you’ve ever connected a laptop or PC to a television as a monitor, the benefit of 4K for text readability is incredibly apparent.

If this isn’t your use case, and you’re not right up against your screen, 1080p is more than good enough; not like most content is coming down on 4K unless you’re paying extra, anyways.

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BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It depends on how far away you sit. But streaming has taken over everything and even a little compression ruins the perceived image quality of a higher-DPI display.

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givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They did get around to saying it’s pixel density at the end…

But still, it’s human variation. Everybody is gonna be different. I’m not a resolution snob, but anything under 100fps pulls me out of the experience. So usually I just run at 1440, when I have fps to spare I’ll put all the settings up rather than go to 4k.

Other people would rather 30fps at 4 or even 8k

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Olap@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
That’s why I have a 65" and sit barely 2m from it. Stick on a 4k Dolby Vision encoded file through Jellyfin. Looks fucking great!

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melfie@lemy.lol ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I stick with 1080p for my Jellyfin library because I can’t really tell much difference on my living room TV between upscaled 1080p and native 4k, at least not enough to merit the huge difference in file size. 4k games when sitting close to my computer monitor, on the other hand, are definitely worth it.

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