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Unless you're displaying on movie theatre sized screens, 8K seems like a waste of space/bandwidth. Even 4K is generally overkill for the typical living room. I

Unless you're displaying on movie theatre sized screens, 8K seems like a waste of space/bandwidth. Even 4K is generally overkill for the typical living room. I think we're hitting the point with video resolution that music CDs hit with audio, where improvements in fidelity are largely outside the range of human perception. It's one of the reasons the music DVDs and SACDs never really caught on.

elzbardico 6y ago
Not sure about that. With large screens 55" at home and over I can see a difference between FHD and 4K, enough to know I am having network problems when the streaming service starts to downscale the resolution in a 4k video.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  that could be the bitrate more than the resolution. streams are highly compressed. would be interesting to see whether you prefer 1080p bluray over a 4k netflix stream (I suspect yes).
michaelmrose 6y ago
1080p at 65 34ppi 4k at 65" 65ppi 8k at 65 135ppi This is well within what someone with good vision can see at for example 6-8 feet For a personal reference I could tell the difference in clarity at 8 ft between a 1080p 24" monitor and a 28"4k monitor. That is 157 vs 92 ppi on a screen a fraction of the size 5 minutes ago. I must imagine people making such claims have poor eyesight or are using optimum viewing charts as a proxy for distances wherein human vision was sufficiently acute instead of looking for themselves. For reference someone with good vision ought to be able to distinguish up to about 115ppi at 8ft according to this source. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-highest-resolution-humans-can-distinguish https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-highest-resolution-humans-... The source seems valid despite the mixed bag that is quora. Especially since I and many others can verify this in 10 seconds. Edit: I wrote 43 instead of 34 by accident. 65" and 1080p = 34ppi
- Syonyk 6y ago
  > Especially since I and many others can verify this in 10 seconds. Try it with a high resolution video you've transcoded locally (so you're not dealing with streaming quality differences) at various resolutions. The human visual system is a lot less precise with video than it is with still images. A paused DVD frame often looks like a blocky, terrible mess, but it's perfectly fine when displayed as video. I won't argue that if you pick your content carefully, and know exactly what to look for, you can tell the difference. But, practically speaking, most people watching a decently encoded video won't see a huge difference from 1080p to 4k at typical screen sizes and viewing distances, and will see even less difference going to 8k. I honestly can't tell you if I'm watching 720p or 1080p content on our TV without looking at the source file info. You're confusing "What can be perceived" with "What actually matters." I'd argue 4k was a bit of a stretch to sell new TVs, and 8k is going to be even more so. We've hit, as someone else said, the 44kHz/16bit point of video. Encoding quality and bitrate matter a bit, just like mastering does with audio, but we're past the point of diminishing returns at this point.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    If you can't tell the difference between 34ppi and 65ppi and typical viewing distances your eyes just don't work very well and you just literally don't realize most people see better than you even if they need glasses to do so. We aren't talking about near the limits of human perception we are capable of perceiving 115ppi at a typical 8 ft viewing distance. 8K for a 65" screen is about the limit. 4k is itself about 1/4 the resolution we can perceive and 1080p is 1/16. You are saying that people can't on average distinguish between 1/4 the resolution we can perceive and 1/16th. The link I posted was the informed opinion of an electrical engineer that worked in display tech. If people really can't tell the difference between 4k and 1080p shouldn't there be scientific research by this point to show this? You can't because there isn't. You are like a color blind person exclaiming there is no difference between green and red! There is.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      I agree with Syonyk here. And since you bring up quality of vision, I'll note that I do have 20/20 vision because I'm wearing prescription glasses. > You are like a color blind person exclaiming there is no difference between green and red! There is. You're arguing against a complete strawman here. The key point that Syonyk was making is this: > I won't argue that if you pick your content carefully, and know exactly what to look for, you can tell the difference. If you're watching a nature documentary or anything else that puts an emphasis on the visuals, people are going to notice the difference by themselves. But most of the stuff we watch doesn't focus on visuals, it focuses on narrative. If I'm watching a legal drama, I don't really care if I can count the hairs in the lawyer's nostril or not. Again, I'll probably be able to tell apart the 4K version from the 1080p version from the 720p version of the lawyer's face's closeup, but even if I watch just the 720p version, it won't significantly impact my enjoyment of the narrative.

elzbardico 6y ago

Not sure about that. With large screens 55" at home and over I can see a difference between FHD and 4K, enough to know I am having network problems when the streaming service starts to downscale the resolution in a 4k video.

leetcrew 6y ago
that could be the bitrate more than the resolution. streams are highly compressed. would be interesting to see whether you prefer 1080p bluray over a 4k netflix stream (I suspect yes).

michaelmrose 6y ago

1080p at 65 34ppi 4k at 65" 65ppi 8k at 65 135ppi This is well within what someone with good vision can see at for example 6-8 feet For a personal reference I could tell the difference in clarity at 8 ft between a 1080p 24" monitor and a 28"4k monitor. That is 157 vs 92 ppi on a screen a fraction of the size 5 minutes ago. I must imagine people making such claims have poor eyesight or are using optimum viewing charts as a proxy for distances wherein human vision was sufficiently acute instead of looking for themselves. For reference someone with good vision ought to be able to distinguish up to about 115ppi at 8ft according to this source. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-highest-resolution-humans-can-distinguish https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-highest-resolution-humans-... The source seems valid despite the mixed bag that is quora. Especially since I and many others can verify this in 10 seconds. Edit: I wrote 43 instead of 34 by accident. 65" and 1080p = 34ppi

Syonyk 6y ago
> Especially since I and many others can verify this in 10 seconds. Try it with a high resolution video you've transcoded locally (so you're not dealing with streaming quality differences) at various resolutions. The human visual system is a lot less precise with video than it is with still images. A paused DVD frame often looks like a blocky, terrible mess, but it's perfectly fine when displayed as video. I won't argue that if you pick your content carefully, and know exactly what to look for, you can tell the difference. But, practically speaking, most people watching a decently encoded video won't see a huge difference from 1080p to 4k at typical screen sizes and viewing distances, and will see even less difference going to 8k. I honestly can't tell you if I'm watching 720p or 1080p content on our TV without looking at the source file info. You're confusing "What can be perceived" with "What actually matters." I'd argue 4k was a bit of a stretch to sell new TVs, and 8k is going to be even more so. We've hit, as someone else said, the 44kHz/16bit point of video. Encoding quality and bitrate matter a bit, just like mastering does with audio, but we're past the point of diminishing returns at this point.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  If you can't tell the difference between 34ppi and 65ppi and typical viewing distances your eyes just don't work very well and you just literally don't realize most people see better than you even if they need glasses to do so. We aren't talking about near the limits of human perception we are capable of perceiving 115ppi at a typical 8 ft viewing distance. 8K for a 65" screen is about the limit. 4k is itself about 1/4 the resolution we can perceive and 1080p is 1/16. You are saying that people can't on average distinguish between 1/4 the resolution we can perceive and 1/16th. The link I posted was the informed opinion of an electrical engineer that worked in display tech. If people really can't tell the difference between 4k and 1080p shouldn't there be scientific research by this point to show this? You can't because there isn't. You are like a color blind person exclaiming there is no difference between green and red! There is.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    I agree with Syonyk here. And since you bring up quality of vision, I'll note that I do have 20/20 vision because I'm wearing prescription glasses. > You are like a color blind person exclaiming there is no difference between green and red! There is. You're arguing against a complete strawman here. The key point that Syonyk was making is this: > I won't argue that if you pick your content carefully, and know exactly what to look for, you can tell the difference. If you're watching a nature documentary or anything else that puts an emphasis on the visuals, people are going to notice the difference by themselves. But most of the stuff we watch doesn't focus on visuals, it focuses on narrative. If I'm watching a legal drama, I don't really care if I can count the hairs in the lawyer's nostril or not. Again, I'll probably be able to tell apart the 4K version from the 1080p version from the 720p version of the lawyer's face's closeup, but even if I watch just the 720p version, it won't significantly impact my enjoyment of the narrative.