Submitted 5 months ago by artifex@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
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 :)
8k is a little high. I feel like 4k is a significant change, especially if you use your screen as a computer monitor.
Yes, as a monitor, if it’s over 30" or so, 4k makes sense. If it’s a TV, 4k doesn’t make much difference given how far most sit from their TV.
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.
My PC is on a 40" TV at 1920 x 1080. Looks great to me, and my eyes aren’t so hot.
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.
As someone with a lowly 1080p projector, I really don’t see the difference.
Viewsonic PX701HDH. I blow it up to 185" and I cannot see the pixels until I am uncomfortably close to the image.
The quality of the display/projector itself makes a huge difference.
Now play 1080p content on it to conjugate
Well, the thing is the 1080 on the 4k projector still looks a little better than it does on a native 1080 because it upscales with pixel shifting. It doesn’t look as sharp as 4k, but still a bit better than 1080 (at least from ~10’ at 120").
I had a 6" 720p phone. Couldn’t tell the resolution, but could definitely tell the longer battery life
Yep, on phones and other mobile devices, lower resolutions help with battery life and much better framerates. My favorite phone was probably the Xperia Z3 Compact, which only had a 720p display but ran for days in a compact form factor. Tiny super high resolution displays are pretty much pointless unless you’re using a VR headset (then the resolution matters more).
But that could easily be due to the quality of the projector rather than the resolution. Everyone in here saying they notice differences is completely missing the point. You’d need to compare against the exact same panel type, manufacturer, model year, etc with the exact same manufacturing processes in order to come to this conclusion yourself.
I get what you are saying, however at 120", less than 20 feet away, you can literally see the individual pixels (especially at 1080). It absolutely does make a difference under the right circumstances, that is empirically true. You can test it yourself if you are skeptical but I’m telling you for a fact that on resolution alone there is a noticeable difference for anyone who has 20/20 vision.
agreed. I have a similar setup and our projectors are not even doing “true” 4k, it’s pixel shifting. so the real thing would be even more noticeable.
Pixel shifting is for when it upscales, isn’t it? If you have a 4k source, you’ll get a 4k picture.
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.
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.
Reason #123798 why I watch archived copies of blu-rays (that were legally purchased completely legally) via Jellyfin/Plex.
No such thing when you’re watching live events, and I (and apparently most everyone else) can’t tell the difference between 4K and 1080 at a reasonable distance anyway.
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.
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
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.
That’s how we watched TV in the CRT era
Michael Scott vibes.
“Brand New Plasma TV. Fits right into the wall.”
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.
Or they buy an 80" TV to hang on the wall of their camper van.
Nah man I can tell 4K from FHD pretty easily, if it’s proper quality. Having a 4K TV helps. :P
I have terrible sight, and on my TV in my living room, I can tell the difference. But I also don’t cheap out.
Exactly. With the right equipment, you should be telling the difference, IMO.
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.
Some displays really are that big, which is why they are trying to make denser panels. But for the “TV in a living room” use case, yeah, we’re already at the point of diminishing returns. That’s why they’re developing other things, like higher resolutions, OLEDs, and 3D.
There’s an e-ink display tech (just published in Nature, so very much in the lab) that has a pixel density >25,000 PPI and it can operate at up to 200FPS. It’s on a scale where 1 pixel to 1 retinal cell is possible.
The color gamut isn’t as wide as sRGB but it’s 100x the gamut of color electrophoretic displays (‘e-Ink’, like in the Kindles).
8K would probably be really good for large computer monitors, due to viewing distances. It would be really taxing on the hardware if you were using it for gaming, but reasonable for tasks that aren’t graphically intense.
Computer monitors (for productivity tasks) are a little different though in that you are looking at section of the screen rather than the screen as a whole as one might with video. So having extra screen real estate can be rather valuable.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of us mount a TV on the wall and watch from a couch across the room.
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.
How many feet away is a computer monitor?
Or a 2-4 person home theater distance that has good fov fill?
Good to know that pretty much anything looks fine on my TV, at typical viewing distances.
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.
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.
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.
You should actually read it, they specified what they looked at.
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.
The article was about TVs, not computer monitors. Most people don’t sit nearly as close to a TV as they do a monitor.
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.
I’ve been investing in my bluray collection again and I can’t believe how good 1080p blurays look compared to “UHD streaming” .
This. The visual difference of good vs bad 1080p is bigger than between good 1080p and good 4k. I will die on this hill. And Youtube’s 1080p is garbage on purpose so they get you to buy premium to unlock good 1080p. Assholes
The 1080p for premium users is garbage too. Youtube’s video quality in general is shockingly poor. If there is even a slight amount of noisy movement on screen (foliage, confetti, rain, snow, etc) the the video can literally become unwatchable.
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.
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.
Yeah I’d way rather have higher bitrate 1080 than 4k. Seeing striping in big dark or light spots on the screen is infuriating
I was wondering when we’d get to the snake oil portion of the video hobby that audiophiles have been suffering. 8k vs. 4k is the new lossy vs. lossless argument.
For most streaming? Yeah.
Give me a good 4k Blu-ray though. High bitrate 4k
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.
I think the premium thing is a channel option. Some channels consistently have it, some don’t.
Regular YouTube 1080p is bad and feels like 720p. The encoding on videos with “Premium 1080p” is catastrophic. It’s significantly worse than decently encoded 480p. Creators will put a lot of time and effort in their lighting and camera gear, then the compression artifacting makes the video feel like watching a porn bootleg on a shady site. I guess there must be a strong financial incentive to nuke their video quality this way.
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.
I stream YouTube at 360p. Really don’t need much for that kind of video.
360p is awful, 720p is the sweet spot IMO.
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.
I can barely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. I will probably never buy another TV.
Maybe I need glasses?
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.
Yeah, I can definitely tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, but the difference isn’t so large as to make me use it everywhere, so I default to 720p unless I need a bit more definition (usually for text).
My TV is 4k but I can’t remember the last time I actually displayed 4k content, almost everything we have is old DVDs (so 480p?) and 1080p Blurays. I don’t see the point in paying extra for Ultra HD when the picture isn’t that much better at our viewing distance.
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
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!
with all the menus now days I mainly want sharp text
iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
The difference between 1080p and 2160p is night and day to me.