4 ms·

This is very useful for large-format technical printouts like blueprints, for a drafting table, or for a table where various users can interact with multiple do

This is very useful for large-format technical printouts like blueprints, for a drafting table, or for a table where various users can interact with multiple documents. The old Microsoft Surface Coffee Table project was something like that but the whole screen was 1024x768. It's not an "esoteric" use case. Every building in the world goes up based on large-format construction drawings. For a large building that's maybe 75 sheets printed at a cost of $3 a sheet. So you have have a $225 set of prints for every project your company is working on and you have to roll all those prints up and store them in between uses. It doesn't take a lot of those prints before you've justified a very expensive display. Showing these files on a digital monitor is like looking at an elephant through a magnifying glass and until now no digital standard has allowed showing these files at full size and resolution simultaneously. You must zoom to read the text. This is just monitors catching up to the resolution that large-format printing has had since the 60s. It's also useful for restaurant menus, movie posters, mall map kiosks, transit maps, airline status displays, bulletin boards... anything you want to display to the public where they can't pan and zoom the way you would on a personal device. There are plenty of uses for a 16k video standard. It just probably isn't going to be your home television.

0_____0 3y ago
For the curious, 4K at 36" (pretty typical construction drawing size) is 106ppi. Playing around in GIMP I find 10px high type to be easily readable at this spatial resolution from about 2' away. It's not pretty but it's certainly enough to be useful. 16K would obviously be much nicer.
duffyjp 3y ago
I would love having one of these in a collaborative workspace. I'll open up the ERD for a modestly complex database and it's illegible on even a 5K monitor. I was asked to bring one to a meeting once so what was I to do other than print it out on an 8.5x11 and shrug. You'd literally need a microscope to read it.
ilyt 3y ago
> It's not an "esoteric" use case. It is at current display prices. And I don't think a technical blueprint projected on big table needs 16k either. It would certainly be nice, sure, but for the big ones to be affordable there needs to be steady stream of customers, not few thousand companies in each country
mrandish 3y ago
> There are plenty of uses for a 16k video standard. It just probably isn't going to be your home television. We agree. High-end data display use cases in a business context are different than consumer living-room couch viewing. I know people who were upsold an expensive "8K" display for their living room assuming it would be "better." They had no clue that none of the video sources they had connected were capable of sending it an 8K image. In fact, the majority of their sources rarely send actual 4k. For example, Comcast Xfinity can ONLY display 4K from their latest box, which very few of their customers have. And even then, Comcast only rarely broadcasts 'special events' in 4K (such as the Superbowl but ONLY if you don't use the DVR, pause or time delay features on their hard-to-get 4K box). I'm a video engineer. I love accurate, pristine, beautiful video imagery. Despite the amazing potential of the advanced standards we've created, and all the manufacturer marketing hype claims about 4K HDR10+, the quality of what most people actually see in their living rooms is already delivering woefully less than what they think they paid for. Hyping 8K (and 16K!) to consumers who aren't even getting the 4K they think they are just seems perverse.

0_____0 3y ago

For the curious, 4K at 36" (pretty typical construction drawing size) is 106ppi. Playing around in GIMP I find 10px high type to be easily readable at this spatial resolution from about 2' away. It's not pretty but it's certainly enough to be useful. 16K would obviously be much nicer.

duffyjp 3y ago

I would love having one of these in a collaborative workspace. I'll open up the ERD for a modestly complex database and it's illegible on even a 5K monitor. I was asked to bring one to a meeting once so what was I to do other than print it out on an 8.5x11 and shrug. You'd literally need a microscope to read it.

ilyt 3y ago

> It's not an "esoteric" use case. It is at current display prices. And I don't think a technical blueprint projected on big table needs 16k either. It would certainly be nice, sure, but for the big ones to be affordable there needs to be steady stream of customers, not few thousand companies in each country

mrandish 3y ago

> There are plenty of uses for a 16k video standard. It just probably isn't going to be your home television. We agree. High-end data display use cases in a business context are different than consumer living-room couch viewing. I know people who were upsold an expensive "8K" display for their living room assuming it would be "better." They had no clue that none of the video sources they had connected were capable of sending it an 8K image. In fact, the majority of their sources rarely send actual 4k. For example, Comcast Xfinity can ONLY display 4K from their latest box, which very few of their customers have. And even then, Comcast only rarely broadcasts 'special events' in 4K (such as the Superbowl but ONLY if you don't use the DVR, pause or time delay features on their hard-to-get 4K box). I'm a video engineer. I love accurate, pristine, beautiful video imagery. Despite the amazing potential of the advanced standards we've created, and all the manufacturer marketing hype claims about 4K HDR10+, the quality of what most people actually see in their living rooms is already delivering woefully less than what they think they paid for. Hyping 8K (and 16K!) to consumers who aren't even getting the 4K they think they are just seems perverse.