Can confirm, artifacts are what ruin the picture, once you're at 1080p resolution or higher. I've got a really big screen (100+") and my two seating rows are at

Can confirm, artifacts are what ruin the picture, once you're at 1080p resolution or higher. I've got a really big screen (100+") and my two seating rows are at only about 5' and 8' distance (measured to roughly where the viewer's head is), and even under those conditions, a high-quality 1080p source looks a ton better on it than a middling-quality 4K source (let alone low-quality 4k), all due to compression artifacts. You'd have to drop the alternative to high-quality 720p resolution before I'd take a middling-quality 4k over it, in how-distracting-is-the-picture-quality terms.