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Is your TV good enough? Human limits of vision.

I have my TV set to the defaults. I tried using the settings recommended by Consumer Reports for my model, and it looked good on streaming movies, but lousy on old TV shows, which is mostly what I watch.

It would be great if you could have half a dozen presets and cycle through them with a simple remote. The remote that came with the LG TV is so complicated it is impossible to use in the dark, or without reading glasses.
 
masterhw said:
The obvious path toward improved experiences is through bitrate and delivery spec
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Amen to that. 4k movie content went from 90-ish gigabytes (via Blu-ray) to 22-ish GB in early streaming, to 13.5 GB in a typical streamed context. Compression is great and all, but there are limits, and they are clearly visible especially in codec-busting scenes like confetti showers or dark stuff
 
nerdstrike said:
Amen to that. 4k movie content went from 90-ish gigabytes (via Blu-ray) to 22-ish GB in early streaming, to 13.5 GB in a typical streamed context. Compression is great and all, but there are limits, and they are clearly visible especially in codec-busting scenes like confetti showers or dark stuff
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Right, I named delivery spec as an avenue of improvement as things like variable bitrate would help codec-busting scenes a lot without ballooning filesize (may even reduce!). I’m ok with smaller sizes if they’re achieved using efficient codecs/parameters, but most leave something on the table. YouTube is perhaps the worst offender, even with YT Premium the highest video bitrate I’ve ever seen is like 400 kbps. routinely the audio’s bitrate is higher than the video’s. and broadcast TV is super compressed too, even when internet based.
 
nerdstrike said:
Amen to that. 4k movie content went from 90-ish gigabytes (via Blu-ray) to 22-ish GB in early streaming, to 13.5 GB in a typical streamed context. Compression is great and all, but there are limits, and they are clearly visible especially in codec-busting scenes like confetti showers or dark stuff
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I buy the discs and rip them to my Plex server for streaming to an NVIDIA Shield, so it's always nice to see a 90 GB transfer. :cool: Earlier this week, I screened the new Arrow release of In The Mouth of Madness for Halloween -- excellent 4K transfer and I by far the best I've ever seen from that film (last time was on VHS).
 
Back in 2016 I had a 46" TV which was just 1080p. Even then I noticed that it looks amazing mostly based on how good the source material is.
I recently watched a 720p movie on my 77" inch 4K OLED and it actually looked amazing as well

On desktop I still want 4k, but it's harder to buy in ultra wide ratios
 
This research aligns with my anecdotal experience. Sat 2.5m from my 65” OLED, it’s extremely difficult to tell 4K and 1080p apart if all other variables are removed (i.e. if it’s an SDR signal). I don’t know if I could do it in an unsighted test to be quite honest.
 
4K is superior in so many ways, even with low bitrate. Not going to go over the benefits as there is AI out there that will help unbelievers to recognize the benefit, if they choose to do so.

The limit of resolution will remain in the content. Old movies were not shot in resolution that can translates to 4K as of now. Remasters of lots of HD Blu Ray content are actually not bad, especially if they add Atmos to the mix. But nothing you could not do with some advanced processor like Lumagen or MadTV.

And Hollywood as inventive as they are, have been working on remastering the library to 4K nits. Based on my extensive experience with formats ranging from VHS, I would not expect much from this endeavor. At least, whey would have to tease me with some advanced remastered Atmos soundtrack to buy into it.
 
Watching a 55' TV at 10 feet, I found an easy setting for the Roku player: 4K DV forced output with any source.
The setting is the same for the BR reader.
That way I do not have any question to ask to myself: the TV is doing its best.
 
valerianf said:
Watching a 55' TV at 10 feet, I found an easy setting for the Roku player: 4K DV forced output with any source.
The setting is the same for the BR reader.
That way I do not have any question to ask to myself: the TV is doing its best.
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Some new(ish) TVs, even inexpensive ones like my TCL, are quite good at upscaling too.
 
Here’s a good fair test to run if you have a 4K gaming console. Run your game. Then go into settings and force resolution to 1080p. Run your game, and compare. Games are very sharp in terms of GUI elements so should show up any obvious differences. Bitrate is removed as a variable. I suspect you’ll need a large viewing distance or very large TV to see a significant difference, but we’ll all have different tolerances to it. I’ll do it myself later this evening.
 
I'd encourage people to read the research directly, rather than that Guardian article. Here's a link to it. Despite the misleading Guardian write-up (which makes it sound like 4K is overkill, because it's talking about very small TVs), the outcome of this research is that actually people are more resolution-sensitive than was previously believed.

To me, the most interesting outcome of this research is that 8K resolution is not actually totally pointless in a home theater context. Using the best knowledge of human visual acuity before, it was just clearly the case that 8K could never have any benefit vs. 4K -- even if you had a fully THX-recommended size screen for your viewing distance, your eyes still couldn't resolve a full 4K, never mind 8K. But with this new study, it turns out that your eyes can actually out-resolve 4K with a screen of that size. Given perfect content, a significant fraction of people would notice the difference between 4K and 8K displays.

(This doesn't mean that 8K is going to happen, of course. The delta between 4K and a visually-perfect display at that distance is pretty small, nowhere near the size of the delta between 1080p and 4K that some people are nonsensically dismissing in this thread. And also of course, 8K doesn't bring anything else to the table -- UHD brought HDR, a wider color gamut, and higher bit depth along with its resolution increase. And also also many people just have very low standards, which is why UHD-BD isn't dominating the world. But it does mean that people -- like me -- who have believed that 8K was completely and totally pointless were wrong. It's just mostly pointless.)
 
What's a good TV that's totally silent when on? No self-noise. MY LG TV has a buzz you can hear when you are near the screen.
 
olds1959special said:
What's a good TV that's totally silent when on? No self-noise. MY LG TV has a buzz you can hear when you are near the screen.
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Check you home electric wiring. TV does not make any noise at all.
 
Mikey said:
I'd encourage people to read the research directly, rather than that Guardian article. Here's a link to it. Despite the misleading Guardian write-up (which makes it sound like 4K is overkill, because it's talking about very small TVs), the outcome of this research is that actually people are more resolution-sensitive than was previously believed.

To me, the most interesting outcome of this research is that 8K resolution is not actually totally pointless in a home theater context. Using the best knowledge of human visual acuity before, it was just clearly the case that 8K could never have any benefit vs. 4K -- even if you had a fully THX-recommended size screen for your viewing distance, your eyes still couldn't resolve a full 4K, never mind 8K. But with this new study, it turns out that your eyes can actually out-resolve 4K with a screen of that size. Given perfect content, a significant fraction of people would notice the difference between 4K and 8K displays.

(This doesn't mean that 8K is going to happen, of course. The delta between 4K and a visually-perfect display at that distance is pretty small, nowhere near the size of the delta between 1080p and 4K that some people are nonsensically dismissing in this thread. And also of course, 8K doesn't bring anything else to the table -- UHD brought HDR, a wider color gamut, and higher bit depth along with its resolution increase. And also also many people just have very low standards, which is why UHD-BD isn't dominating the world. But it does mean that people -- like me -- who have believed that 8K was completely and totally pointless were wrong. It's just mostly pointless.)
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OK, but, I think there are two small but bitter pills in this 8k TV thing:
  1. People able to afford a TV big enough for 8k to make practical sense will often be at an age when their vision isn't perfect any more. The same "catch" as with aging hearing and the so called high end HiFi.
  2. "8k BluRay" is nowhere in sight and "data reduced" streaming is "castrating" UHD already.
But marketing will probably sell anything.
 
@Mikey seems to have summarised it perfectly. Very few people benefit from 8k displays, but nearly everyone benefits from a bigger 4K display.
 
The only benefit I can see in 8K TVs is that with right processing it would enable people to sit closer to the set and get more immersion. Won't make much difference to most, but you can't really view 115" 4K TV from 8 feet. Not that many would like that, but some oddballs might be out there...
 
Oddball said:
The only benefit I can see in 8K TVs is that with right processing it would enable people to sit closer to the set and get more immersion. Won't make much difference to most, but you can't really view 115" 4K TV from 8 feet. Not that many would like that, but some oddballs might be out there...
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Lucky you
I'm sitting 2 m from a 65" UHD TV, if it were bigger, I would see the edges distorted, because of glasses (probably I do already, but the brain compensates).
 
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