4 Reasons Not to Get a 4K TV — Yet (Archive)

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ramicio

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I don't know why they keep harping on the link. ALL retail video is delivered in 4:2:0. Why do they insist on decoding to 4:4:4? Just transfer 4:2:0 to the TV and you won't need a high speed link. As for TV stuff, there isn't even 1080p60 yet, just 1080i60 and 720p60. There isn't going to be 2160x for TV stuff in the US for many years. People mainly want 2160p for movies, not TV. There is also BD-XL, that no one uses yet, and HEVC is on the way soon. Oh, and it's not called 4k, it's called UltraHD, or 2160p.
 

IndignantSkeptic

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g00fysmiley, there is no reason to build certain resolutions into game engines. If the engine is designed correctly it will render at any resolution whether the programmer knows of the resolution or not. This is why I get so angry when console games are being released as HD remasters when nothing has been changed except that the render resolution is different which is something that is handled automatically on properly programmed PC games. People are being fooled.
 

sicofante

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@pillipw: "Change the numbers to 1920*1080, and it could be a cut-n-paste from 1995. The same was being said (and written) about HD."

This is so wrong I don't even know were to start. HD brough 16:9 and the right resolution for a 40" to 60" sized screen that any living room can take. That was the obvious reason for having it. 4K is a desperate move by the industry to "bring nothing to the table", as you put it, when margins are going razor thin on current panels. Only a very small elite can put a 60"+ screen in their living room and sit close enough to need more than the current 2K or "FullHD". When not even all channels are distributed in FHD -air, cable or online-, and DVDs are still selling well (for the up-to-32" crowd, I can only guess), talking about 4K is plain ridiculous and can only be explained by the interests of an industry seeing their margins plumetting.

There will NEVER be a need for 4K in 99% of the living rooms of the world. The human eyes won't change just because of an industrial fad. 4K is good for filiming/postproduction and maybe (only maybe) for theaters. That's pretty much it. (Recording will always benefit for as many "K" as possible, since cropping is a post tool for the increasing number of lazy directors, but there's absolutely no need for it otherwise).

What is barely needed is not 4K, but higher bit depths, contrast and brightness for the current 1080p standard. What's barely needed is that all broadcasting and distribution is made in at least 720p ASAP, and transitioning to 1080p@60/50hz as fast as possible. What's barely needed is that all banding and compression artifacts disappear for good from the daily content we get today.

I understand it's much easier for Samsung, Sony or Panasonic to add more pixels and call it a day, but that's definitely not what the movies we watch everyday and the displays we use everyday to watch them need.
 

Sunius

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"That may sound good, but today's LCD panels can display at least 10 bits (about 1 billion shades) of color — so this high-resolution video will appear with a comparatively low amount of color nuance."

Wat did I just read? Seriously?
 

randomizer

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40" sure, but at 60" the quality of the image is going to be poorer unless you sit pretty far away. The industry wants to keep selling bigger and bigger TVs (despite living rooms not getting any bigger), but you're really not gaining anything by upsizing because you get the exact same image. At least if you improve the resolution then you are actually gaining something.

I'm more interested in 2560x1440 content myself. That's the resolution of my monitor so no scaling required :) It's also a much less radical step up and provides a smoother transition to higher resolution content that is easier and cheaper to distribute.



They're obviously talking about a bionic eye that is capable of perceiving the difference between 8 and 10 bit colour depth in a moving scene.
 

razor512

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Why not release some 8K tv's

the top end cameras can not record natively at 5K, and many higher end shots done with 65-70mm film is scanned in at 8K.

Why not skip 4K and move to 8K, then let us experience all of the quality from todays highest quality cameras?
 

wdmfiber

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Pixar movie, lol... Fake, computer generated.
Bright thou, like a kids coloring book. However DVD and an old tube are all you need for that.

For real actors and scenery 24 fps film look the best; but it's ok if digitized on Blu-ray at 1080p/24. 60fps would only be used for sports(or a scenic demo), as a movie would look terrible. Hollywood knows this, as The Hobbit was the science experiment (24 vs. 48).
 

10tacle

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I've seen the 4K TVs in Worst Buy's "Magnolia Room" on display. An LG 65" if I remember correctly. Or something big hoss like that with an $8k price tag. I wasn't overly impressed. Not like I was in 1994 when visiting Washington DC's Smithsonian Science & Technology Center's display of a Sony 40" plasma 720p HDTV showing a recorded football match (soccer to we Americans) and actually seeing the faces of the people in the stands for the first time. I'll never forget that. And it took over a decade later for me to get my first 720p plasma that I paid nearly $2k for.

Not sure what it is, but for me, it was a bigger leap going from 480p to 720p than it was to 1080p. I see the same for 4k. Have we hit the law of diminishing returns on what the human eye can appreciate?
 

CaedenV

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4 reasons for me not to buy one yet
1) Price. Come down to ~$2000 for a 50 inch and we will talk
2) Standards. As I would be using this primarily as a monitor and not a TV I really need some standards to follow. Not just the HDMI issue, but all of the screens on the market today, when hooked up to a computer, act as 2 independent displays. My understanding is that some are interlaced, some are top/bottom, some are left/right, and some don't work at all. It needs to be a single unified display capable of at least 60hz that runs on a single cable.
3) GPU hardware needs to catch up a bit. The bulk of my content is software instead of videos, and all of that is ready for 4K glory... but my single GTX570 is not. Even a few Titans can't push those kinds of frames yet. In a few years it won't be a problem... but it is not ready for today.
4) Video Content. As someone else said, often 1080p is not done right yet by many distributors. That is not to say that 4K will not be an improvement... but things like contrast, refresh, frame rate (repeated or unique), and audio quality are more important than moving from 1080p to 4K. Thankfully 4K is the last practical standard for home use, so perhaps in 10 years we will see other things improve rather than sheer resolution.


All of that said, I still really want one. Editing 1080p video would be a much better process, multi tasking would be so much easier, games can finally get rid of AA lines with very little filtering, and pictures can be viewed much closer to native resolution. Lots of things open up with this screen size, and I hope to have money to buy one once they are affordable and standardized, but I fully understand that this is 'new' technology, and it is going to be another 5 years or so before it is really ready for prime time.
 

phillipw

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" Look at the smokes u can tell there isnt enough grey color to correctly display the color. "

Tomfreak,
And you are basing this opinion on? Could be it's just a bad image....terribly compressed?
 

x2ruff4u

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I would rather have a AMOLED monitor at least 30" with 120hz. Why bother with 4K right now when monitors are behind still.
 

BigMack70

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4k won't be worth it for TV for like 10 years. But for PC gaming on the other hand....... as soon as they get a 4k 60Hz screen out for a decent price, I'm buying one.
 

omnimodis78

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Frankly I'm not entirely sold on the marketing that 4K is next step in HD standard. I would much rather see high-end panels making it into mainstream. Fine-tuning what is already out there. Making monitors/TVs as energy efficient as they can possibly be. All those things. On my 42" screen I can barely (though I can) discern between a good 720p an average 1080p. Let's not even mention that a really well (re-)mastered 1080p movie is so good that I honestly can't imagine it being any better unless I was inches away from the screen. Let's hope that the whole 4K thing will pass just like 3D did (is?)
 

alidan

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@kawininjazx

any movie with grain in it, or is shot and has grain, i don't want digitally removed, that process more often than not kills the movie, making it less sharp, or in some extreme cases, makes everyone look like wax dummies

 
G

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Some people should "update" their info...

1. theaters are using 24p for decades, but at home everyone needs 60? why? anything above 30fps our eyes can't see...
2.No 4K content? then why do you have/use a fullHD tv?
there is no 1080p signal in BD quality for your tv-channels, is there?!
3.If you cant see e difference between (same screen size) a 1080p and a 4k screen, get your eyes checked...
 

ThermalV

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"The problem is that when displayed at the scale of reading on a page, serif text can not display the thick and thin subtleties of the fonts. Constant zooming in is not entirely useful as it's necessary to see the overall composition of the page. Does anyone else- especially graphic designers- experience this?"

Yes very much! I have tried 1440p monitors and for some fonts there is just no way of getting around that loss of detail without zooming! 4k is very much a step forward for this kind of use, when I can look at a screen that is almost like paper (No grid, no pixels, no distortion) then I will be very happy!
 

f-14

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put a DVI Connection on it and SOLD by the 10,000's!!!

where and when can i buy one this is the next step for a perfect computer monitor!

i could make even NVIDIA and AMD choke trying to triple monitor these for a few combat flight simulators, i'm not even sure the games would support the max resolution of this but i would pay over $4 grand to try!

HDMI sucks, BluRay was obsolete even before it retailed, don't need streaming video service built in esp. if i'm using it for my PC, television is going the way of the dodo Bird, camcorder? hollywood is stuck on 1080p not realizing that was surpassed in 1995 that i can recall and film is infinite x P as far as future technology is concerned for the next 50 years still.

",There is no Blu-ray disc, streaming video service, TV channel or even 'affoRDdable' camcorder that supports the 3,840-by-2,160-pixel resolution of 4K video. That's a good first reason to wait on this technology, and it could be a long wait."
 

Max_x2

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Like someone said, movies are in 24 frames per second format (at least in north america). So i don't get the 60fps choppy part of the article. Nonetheless, i believe, too, that people shou;d wait to upgrade to 4K
 
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