The TV industry concedes that the future may not be in 8K(arstechnica.com) |
The TV industry concedes that the future may not be in 8K(arstechnica.com) |
I got a 65inch TV recently, and up close HD looks pretty bad, but at about 3m away it's fine.
For normal size apartments 55-65 inch is indeed the best size considering the distances. It's a pity that the manufactures don't make 8k 55 inch TVs..
The last ones I saw for sale were below 600 usd in physical stores from name brands (LG). Mine was just under 1000 when I got it.
Why we can’t buy the same panels as monitors is a mystery to me.
For my computer monitor, I ended up going with a cartoonishly large 85 inch 8k. It was somewhat of an adventure getting it into my house, but once it was set up I absolutely love it.
I don’t really see the point of 8k for anything but computer monitors but it’s absolutely great for that.
it seems conventional wisdom (for good or bad) would say 32" at 1440p isn't that great for productivity and one wants a full 4k monitor at that size for productivity use, and 8k at 85" would be about the same pixel density of 1440p at 32"
Personally, I'd consider that large of a screen, a bad working area.
But if you have it wall mounted at eye level or a deep desk you're likely okay.
My 55 is borderline too big already, and the main issue is actually the height. Tilting your head or rolling your eyes back to see the top gets noticeably uncomfortable pretty quickly.
I made a special mount so the lower edge basically rests on the desk surface which basically solved that issue, but I don't think I could have made it work if it was any bigger.
Also at 65 the pixel density is much lower, so you'd probably want it mounted further away. But if you do, the monitor will cover the same FOV as a smaller monitor anyway.
My dream is that someone starts making 8K 50" monitors with displayport inputs (HDMI is a mess) and sells them for the same price as these tv's used to cost!
While the step from 1080p 1440p to 4K is a visible difference, I don't think going from 4K to 8K would be a visible since the pixels are already invisible at 4K.
However the framerate drop would be very noticeable...
OTOH, afaik for VR headsets you may want higher resolutions still due to the much larger field of vision
Depending on whether you want a TV experience sitting further back or Cinema is coming Home as Sony's tag line. I believe there is room for something greater than 4K. Especially when TV industry trend suggest TV purchase size is increasing every year. 40" used to be big, then it became entry level, now all top of the line TV dont even offer anything before 50", and the median is moving closer to 65". 80"+ price will come down in the next 5 years as LCD takes over again from OLED. I dont understand why but also wont be surprised if median size move pass 70".
In 2015 I wrote on AVSforum how 8K makes zero sense from Codec, computation, network, transport and TV. However I would never imagine median TV size moved up so quickly, and also I cant see how we could afford 100"+ TV at the time. Turns out I am dead wrong. TCL / CSOT will produce its first 130" TV in 2 years time. For those ultra wealthy they could afford 160" to 220" MicroLED made out of many panels. There will be 10% of population who could afford ultra large screen size. And I am sure there is a market for premium 4K + content.
There is definitely a future with 4K+ content and panel. I just hope we dont give up too early.
The median (and roughly 99th percentile for that matter) TV as well as being 65" is being used with Netflix et al. though, and that content already looks worse than you can buy on disc.
8k doesn't need to wait for TV sizes any more, right, but now it needs to wait for home internet speeds (and streaming provider infrastructure/egress costs) for it to make sense.
I'm sure there's plenty of content (especially streaming content in mediocre bitrate) where people would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
But I think if people went back to 1080p _panels_; they'd actually rather quickly notice how much worse the text-rendering is, and that the UI looks off for them.
Moving up to 8k would definitely be a smaller step-change in clarity than 1080p->4K and many people wouldn't feel it's worth spending extra; but I don't think it would be literally indistinguishable.
I mean my local cable TV is sending crap that's way worse than 720p YouTube videos and most people don't care at all.
I guess the primary benefit of an 8k display is that stuck or dead pixels are much less annoying than on a 4k panel of the same size.
I'm fine with 4k for my living room. Give me more HDR, less chroma subsampling and less banding.
Unfortunately, I haven't found any high visual quality 8K streams.
I doubt I’m unique.
There was no hope of actual 8k gaming any time soon even before the AI bubble wrecked the PC hardware market.
Attempting to render 33 million pixels per frame seems like utter madness, when 1080p is a mere 2 million, and Doom/Quake were great with just 64000. Lets have more frames instead?
(Such a huge pixel count for movies while stuck at a ‘cinematic’ 24fps, an extremely low temporal resolution, is even sillier)
So anyone who wants only "real frames" (Non upscaled, non generated) will need to lower their settings or only play games a few years old. But I think this will be something that becomes so natural that no one even thinks about it. Disabling it will belike someone lowering AA settings or whatever. Something only done by very niche players, like the CS community does today where some are playing 4:3 screens, lowering AA settings for maximum visibility not fidelity and so on.
I even doubt that. My experience is, on a 65" TV, 4K pixels become indistinguishable from 1080p beyond 3 meters. I even tested that with friends on the Mandalorian show, we couldn't tell 4K or 1080p apart. So I just don't bother with 4K anymore.
Of course YMMV if you have a bigger screen, or a smaller room.
It really isn't.
What you are likely seeing is HDR which is on most (but not all!) 4K content. The HDR is a separate layer and unrelated to the resolution.
4K versions of films are usually newly restored with modern film scanning - as opposed to the aging masters created for the DVD era that were used to churn out 1st generation Blu-Rays.
The difference between a 4K UHD without HDR and a 1080p Blu-Ray that was recently remastered in 4K from the same source is basically imperceptible from any reasonable viewing distance.
The "visible difference" is mostly better source material, and HDR.
Of course people will convince themselves what they are seeing justifies the cost of the upgrade, just like the $200 audiophile outlet and $350 gold-plated videophile Ethernet cable makes the audio and video really "pop".
Basically 400MB for 12 bytes/pixel (64bit HDR RGBA + 32bit depth/stencil)
vs the 64000 bytes that Doom had to fill...
As for the cinema, there are a limited amount of seats where you can get the best immersion and they are in the sweet spot of screen size/distance
Human FOV is very nearly 180 degrees.
I agree, but that is still the case here. The difference is that the "full picture" no longer occupies the whole monitor.
The amount of windows and content you arrange on a normal office monitor is about one third of my available space. I can arrange my windows in that space and not have to move my neck.
But at a glance, I can also see the contents of 4 other code files in my project that are also visible, as well as my notes, the documentation, the team chat.
Or if I want, I can also see twice the amount of code in any file by having my editor take up the full height of the center third of this monitor.
Basically the monitor goes from being the "full picture" to a canvas where you are free to create any collection of a "full picture" you want, and you can have the leftover building blocks visible on the sides, optionally.
I am sure that if you let all knowledge workers in the world test this setup for a day, a vast majority of them would want to keep it. But since even 8k tv's are going away now, most will never know.
Curved gaming monitors costing more than my TV are being deployed everywhere lately, for productivity work. Most people are used to 27" or 24" low-res monitors and they are getting an upgrade, but i's not a very good one.
Had the panels from 8k tv's been used in monitors and marketed to corporations it would have been so much better!
Perfect for open offices too - no need for desk dividers if everyone is behind a huge screen! ;-)
>Perfect for open offices too - no need for desk dividers if everyone is behind a huge screen! ;-)
Folks have been using 2-3 monitors for quite some time with the same purpose, but I also don't get the idea of the dividers.
Of these I think Windows has the best solution with a utility called Fancyzones (part of a collection called Powertoys). I can define areas of any size and shape and easily move windows around so they occupy the defined spaces.
In Linux I have used KDE, which has at least one similar mechanism which works fine too, but was more trickly to set up and configure.
Lately I have also been running hyprland more often and the setup actually works well with a tiling WM. You can tile many times before the windows get too small to be useable!
One thing worth mentioning is that it's kinda tricky to get 8k/60hz working under linux since the TV only does HDMI. I tried several 8k DP to HDMI adapters before I found one that worked. Windows and Mac work fine with a normal 8k HDMI cable.
On the mac I just use manual window management, since most of what I do on the mac tends to just use one main window anyway (garage band, lightroom, photoshop and such).
Without HDR the differences are negligible or imperceptible at a standard 10' viewing distance.
I'll take it one step further: a well-mastered 1080p Blu-Ray beats 4K streaming hands down every time.
But that’s an unrealistic comparison, because 4K often gets a better bitrate, more advanced codec, etc. If the 4K and 1080P source are both “good”, 4K will look better.