Technology

Quality of the system is such a massive dependency here, I can well believe that someone watching old reruns from a shitty streaming service that is upscaled to 1080p or 4k by their TV they purchased from the supermarket with coupons collected from their breakfast cereal is going to struggle to tell the difference.

Likewise if you fed the TVs with a high end 4k blu ray player and any blu ray considered reference such as Interstellar, you are still going to struggle to tell the difference, even with a more midrange TV unless the TVs get comically large for the viewing distance so that the 1080p screen starts to look pixelated.

I think very few people would expect their old wired apple earphones they got free with their iphone 4 would expect amazing sound from them, yet people seem to be ignoring the same for cheap TVs. I am not advocating for ultra high end audio/videophile nonsense with systems costing 10s of thousands, just that quite large and noticeable gains are available much lower down the scale.

Depending what you watch and how you watch it, good quality HDR for the right content is an absolute home run for difference between standard 1080p and 4k HDR if your TV can do true black. Shit TVs do HDR shitterly, its just not comparable to a decent TV and source. Its like playing high rez loss less audio on those old apple wired earphones vs. playing low bitrate MP3s.

This study was brought to you by every streaming service.

I have 65" 4K TV that runs in tandem with Beelink S12 pro mini-pc. I ran mini in FHD mode to ease up on resources and usually just watch streams/online content on it which is 99% 1080p@60. Unless compression is bad, I don't feel much difference. In fact, my digitalized DVDs look good even in their native resolution.

For me 4K is a nice-to-have but not a necessity when consuming media. 1080p still looks crisp with enough bitrate.

I'd add that maybe this 4K-8K race is sort of like mp3@320kbps vs flac/wav. Both sound good when played on a decent system. But say, flac is nicer on a specific hardware that a typical consumer wouldn't buy. Almost none of us own studio-grade 7.1 sytems at home. JBL speaker is what we have and I doubt flac sounds noticeably better on it against mp3@192kbps.

After years of saying I think a good 1080p TV, playing a good quality media file, looks just as good on any 4k TV I have seen, I now feel justified........and ancient.

I don't like large 4k displays because the resolution is so good it breaks the immersion when you watch a movie. You can see that they are on a set sometimes, or details of clothing in medieval movies that give away they were created with modern sewing equipment.

It's a bit of a stupid reason I guess, but that's why I don't want to go above 1080p for tv's.

I've been looking at screens for 50+ years, and I can confirm, my eyesight is worse now than 50 years ago.

The main advantage in 4K TVs "looking better" are...

1. HDR support. Especially Dolby Vision, gives noticeably better picture in bright scenes.

2. Support for higher framerates. This is only really useful for gaming, at least until they broadcast sports at higher framerates.

3. The higher resolution is mostly wasted on video content where for the most part the low shutter speed blurs any moving detail anyway. For gaming it does look better, even if you have to cheat with upscaling and DLSS.

4. The motion smoothing. This is a controversial one, because it makes movies look like swirly home movies. But the types of videos used in the shop demos (splashing slo-mo paints, slow shots of jungles with lots of leaves, dripping honey, etc) does look nice with the motion interpolation switched on. They certainly don't show clips of the latest blockbuster movies like that, because it will become rapidly apparent just how jarring that looks.

The higher resolution is just one part of it, and it's not the most important one. You could have the other features on a lower resolution screen, but there's no real commercial reason to do that, because large 4K panels are already cheaper than the 1080p ones ever were. The only real reason to go higher than 4K would be for things where the picture wraps around you, and you're only supposed to be looking at a part of it. e.g. 180 degree VR videos and special screens like the Las Vegas Sphere.

I just love how all the articles and everything about this study go "Do you need another TV or monitor?" instead of "here's a chart how to optimize your current setup, make it work without buying shit". 😅

An overly compressed 4k stream will look far worse than a good quality 1080p. We keep upping the resolution without getting newer codecs and not adjusting the bitrate.

i can confirm 4K and up add nothing for me compared to 1080p and even 720p. As long as i can recognize the images, who cares. Higher resolution just means you see more sweat, pimples, and the like.

edit: wait correction. 4K does add something to my viewing experience which is a lot of lagging due to the GPU not being able to keep up.

ITT: people defending their 4K/8K display purchases as if this study was a personal attack on their financial decision making.

The study doesn't actually claim that. The actual title is "Study Boldly Claims 4K And 8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes, But Is It True?" As with all articles that ask a question the answer is either NO or its complicated.

It says that we can distinguish up to 94 pixels per degree or about 1080p on a 50" screen at 10 feet away.

This means that on a 27" monitor 18" away 1080p: 29 4K: 58 8K: 116

A 40" TV 8 feet away/50" TV 10 feet away

1080p: 93

A 70" TV 8 feet away

1080p: 54 4K: 109 8K: 218

A 90" TV 10 feet away

1080p: 53 4K: 106 8K: 212

Conclusion: 1080p is good for small TVs relatively far away. 4K makes sense for reasonably large or close TV Up to 8K makes sense for monitors.

https://qasimk.io/screen-ppd/

This finding is becoming less important by the year. It's been quite a while since you could easily buy an HD TV - they're all 4K, even the small ones.

8k no. 4k with a 4k Blu-ray player on actual non upscaled 4k movies is fucking amazing.

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.

Bullshit, actual factual 8k and 4k look miles better than 1080. It's the screen size that makes a difference. On a 15inch screen you might not see much difference but on a 75 inch screen the difference between 1080 and 4k is immediately noticeable. A much larger screen would have the same results with 8k.

I think the real problem is that anything less than 4k looks like shit on a 4k tv

4k with shit streaming bitrate is barely better than high bitrate 1080p

But full bitrate 4k from a Blu-ray IS better.

Personal anecdote, moving from 1080p to 2k for my computer monitor is very noticeable for games

I can pretty confidently say that 4k is noticeable if you're sitting close to a big tv. I don't know that 8k would ever really be noticeable, unless the screen is strapped to your face, a la VR. For most cases, 1080p is fine, and there are other factors that start to matter way more than resolution after HD. Bit-rate, compression type, dynamic range, etc.

Black and white antennae TV's from the 1950's was clearer than a lot of TV's today, but they weighed 600 kilograms. Nowadays I buy cheap, small TV's and let my brain fill in the empty spaces like it's supposed to. /s

Here’s the gut-punch for the typical living room, however. If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish.

That seems in line with common knowledge? Say you want to keep your viewing angle at ~40º for a home cinema, at 2.5m of distance, that means your TV needs to have an horizontal length of ~180cm, which corresponds to ~75" diagonal, give or take a few inches depending on the aspect ratio.

For a more conservative 30° viewing angle, at the same distance, you'd need a 55" TV. So, 4K is perceivable at that distance regardless, and 8K is a waste of everyone's time and money.

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.

Please note at 18-24" with a 27" screen 4K does not max out what the eye can see according to this very study. EG all the assholes who told you that 4K monitors are a waste are confirmed blind assholes.