I can still find 480p videos from when YouTube first started that rival the quality of the compressed crap “1080p” we get from YouTube today. It’s outrageous.

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.

YouTube is locking the good bitrates behind the premium paywall and even as a premium users you don't get to select a high bitrate when the source video was low res.

That's why videos should be upscaled before upload to force YouTube into offering high bitrate options at all. A good upscaler produces better results than simply stretching low-res videos.

I've been investing in my bluray collection again and I can't believe how good 1080p blurays look compared to "UHD streaming" .

HEVC is damn efficient. I don’t even bother with HD because a 4K HDR encode around 5-10GB looks really good and streams well for my remote users.

I stream YouTube at 360p. Really don't need much for that kind of video.

Seriously, articles like this are just clickbait.

They also ignore all sorts of usecases.

Like for a desktop monitor, 4k is extremely noticeable vs even 1440P or 1080P/2k

Unless you're sitting very far away, the sharpness of text and therefore amount of readable information you can fit on the screen changes dramatically.

So, a 55-inch TV, which is pretty much the smallest 4k TV you could get when they were new, has benefits over 1080p at a distance of 7.5 feet... how far away do people watch their TVs from? Am I weird?

And at the size of computer monitors, for the distance they are from your face, they would always have full benefit on this chart. And even working into 8k a decent amount.

And that's only for people with typical vision, for people with above-average acuity, the benefits would start further away.

But yeah, for VR for sure, since having an 8k screen there would directly determine how far away a 4k flat screen can be properly re-created. If your headset is only 4k, a 4k flat screen in VR is only worth it when it takes up most of your field of view. That's how I have mine set up, but I would imagine most people would prefer it to be half the size or twice the distance away, or a combination.

So 8k screens in VR will be very relevant for augmented reality, since performance costs there are pretty low anyway. And still convey benefits if you are running actual VR games at half the physical panel resolution due to performance demand being too high otherwise. You get some relatively free upscaling then. Won't look as good as native 8k, but benefits a bit anyway.

There is also fixed and dynamic foveated rendering to think about, with an 8k screen, even running only 10% of it at that resolution and 20% at 4k, 30% at 1080p, and the remaining 40% at 540p, even with the overhead of so many foveation steps, you'll get a notable reduction in performance cost. Fixed foveated would likely need to lean higher towards bigger percentages of higher res, but has the performance advantage of not having to move around at all from frame to frame. Can benefit from more pre-planning and optimization.

There's a giant TV at my gym that is mounted right in front of some of the equipment, so my face is inches away. It must have some insane resolution because everything is still as sharp as a standard LCD panel.

8K would probably be really good for large computer monitors, due to viewing distances. It would be really taxing on the hardware if you were using it for gaming, but reasonable for tasks that aren't graphically intense.

Computer monitors (for productivity tasks) are a little different though in that you are looking at section of the screen rather than the screen as a whole as one might with video. So having extra screen real estate can be rather valuable.

Good to know that pretty much anything looks fine on my TV, at typical viewing distances.

The counterpoint is that if you're sitting that close to a big TV, it's going to fill your field of view to an uncomfortable degree.

4k and higher is for small screens close up (desktop monitor), or very large screens in dedicated home theater spaces. The kind that would only fit in a McMansion, anyway.

People are legit sitting 15+ feet away and thinking a 55 inch TV is good enough... Optimal viewing angles for most reasonably sized rooms require a 100+ inch TV and 4k or better.

How many feet away is a computer monitor?

Or a 2-4 person home theater distance that has good fov fill?

Would be a more useful graph if the y axis cut off at 10, less than a quarter of what it plots.

Not sure what universe where discussing the merits of 480p at 45 ft is relevant, but it ain't this one. If I'm sitting 8 ft away from my TV, I will notice the difference if my screen is over 60 inches, which is where a vast majority of consumers operate.

This is true. That said, if can't tell the difference between 1080p and 4K from the pixels alone, then either your TV is too small, or you're sitting too far away. In which case there's no point in going with 4K.

At the right seating distance, there is a benefit to be had even by going with an 8K TV. However, very few people sit close enough/have a large enough screen to benefit from going any higher than 4K:

Source: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/what-is-the-resolution

I went looking for a quick explainer on this and that side of youtube goes so indepth I am more confused.

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

Full Blu-Ray quality 1080p sources will look significantly better than Netflix 4K.

Hence why "4K" doesn't actually matter unless your panel is gigantic or you're sitting very close to it. Resolution is a very small part of our perceived notion of quality.

Depends on your eyes quite a bit, too. If I'm sitting more than 15' back from a 55" screen, 1080p is just fine. Put on my distance glasses and I might be able to tell the difference with 4K.

Exactly. This title is just clickbait.

The actual study's title is "Resolution limit of the eye — how many pixels can we see?".

Pixel density is what makes content appear sharp rather than raw resolution. 800p on a 7" screen is plenty, if you think about it a 50" 1080p TV is almost 10x the size more than 50x the size with a ~25% increase in (vertical) resolution

I've been using "cheap" 43" 4k TVs as my main monitor for over a decade now. I used to go purely with Hisense, they have great colour and PC text clarity, and I could get them most places for $250 CAD. But this year's model they switched from RGB subpixel layout to BGR, which is tricky to get working cleanly on a computer, even when forcing a BGR layout in the OS. One trick is to just flip the TV upside down (yes it actually works) but it just made the whole physical setup awkward. I went with a Sony recently for significantly more, but the picture quality is fantastic.

And then there’s the dev that still insists on limiting lines to 80 chars & you have all that blank space to the side & have to scroll forever per file, sigh….

I don't know if this will age like my previous belief that PS1 had photo-realistic graphics, but I feel like 4k is the peak for TVs. I recently bought a 65" 4k TV and not only is it the clearest image I've ever seen, but it takes up a good chunk of my livingroom. Any larger would just look ridiculous.

Unless the average person starts using abandoned cathedrals as their livingrooms, I don't see how larger TVs with even higher definition would even be practical. Especially if you consider we already have 8k for those who do use cathedral entertainment systems.

I think you're right but how many movies are available in UHD? Not too many I'd think. On my thrifting runs I've picked up 200 Blurays vs 3 UHDs. If we can map that ratio to the retail market that's ~1% UHD content.

life changing. i love watching movies, but the experience you get from a 4k disc insane.

Interestingly enough, I was casually window browsing TVs and was surprised to find that LG killed off their OLED 8K TVs a couple years ago!

Until/if we get to a point where more people want/can fit 110in+ TVs into their living rooms - 8K will likely remain a niche for the wealthy to show off, more than anything.

Yeah, when I got my most recent GPU, my plan had been to also get a 4k monitor and step up from 1440p to 4k. But when I was sorting through the options to find the few with decent specs all around, I realized that there was nothing about 1440p that left me dissapointed and the 4k monitor I had used at work already indicated that I'd just be zooming the UI anyways.

Plus even with the new GPU, 4k numbers weren't as good as 1440p numbers, and stutters/frame drops are still annoying... So I ended up just getting an ultra-wide 1440p monitor that was much easier to find good specs for and won't bother with 4k for a monitor until maybe one day if it becomes the minimum, kinda like how analog displays have become much less available than digital displays, even if some people still prefer the old ones for some purposes. I won't dig my heels in and refuse to move on to 4k, but I don't see any value added over 1440p. Same goes for 8k TVs.

4K streams crush all of the dark colors and leave you with these nasty banding effects that I don’t see as often on lower resolution streams.

Reason #123798 why I watch archived copies of blu-rays (that were legally purchased completely legally) via Jellyfin/Plex.

It's the ratio of screen size to distance from the screen. But typically you sit further from larger screens, so there's an optimization problem in there somewhere.