RocShemp

I'm sure h'es currently fapping to the thought of buying another set of discs he'll never watch.

PerryD

According to the following chart, at my screen size and viewing distance, I can resolve better than 8k resolution, so maybe I should start saving up.

Solid Snake

huh...8k does seems like the choice to make.

BuckNaked2k

I'll need Lasik to appreciate anything better than 1080p. Besides, I think HD audio is at least 50% of the experience....can't get any better than lossless.

Josh Z

The new h.265 codec is supposed to cut those bandwidth needs at least in half or more.

MTRodaba2468

Episodes 2 and 3 probably won't unless they're upconverted; they were shot in 1080p.

zyzzle

Well, I don't trust the .h265 codec. Sooner or later, something has to give in compression. How is it possible to reduce bandwidth requirements by half without there being some major problems added? .h264 is already very, very efficient!

Drexl

That chart looks really off compared to ones I saw in years past. You can be 20 feet away from a 30-inch screen and really tell the difference between 720p and 1080p?

I remember the numbers being 8 feet away from an 80-inch screen to resolve anything higher than 1080p (or to fully resolve 4k, I'm not sure).

JeffTheAlpaca

So is 4K the highest resolution you can possibly go?

Strange since besides Blu-ray discs and Directv Cinema you can't get a lot of programs in 1080p yet and now they want to do 4K.

Just makes me wonder will 55" TVs be considered small in the future where any average joe can buy it while 84" or maybe 100" are considered the best you can get?

Match

That viewing distance chart changed. It used to be this:

Matthew Chmiel

Most films shot in digital are shot in 1080p unless you're shooting with a RED model or something similar.

JeffTheAlpaca

Still wonder how much the demand will be there when people stream almost everything and are happy with poor picture quality.

These new TVs will have to be free of flashlighting, clouding, line bleeding, and burn in.

orangerunner

I still think the success of the current HDTVs have less to do with the fact that they are Hi-Def and more to do with their asthetic quality ie. slim, sleek look, light-weight, hang on your wall like a picture frame etc.

Blu-ray has failed to attact large sales numbers even though the quality, as of today, is unrivaled. Having mass-produced 4K physical media content is highly unlikely.

Unless some serious bandwidth breakout happens, 4K will only attract those that have 35mm projectors in their basements.

Josh Z

People said that about MPEG-2 as well. Technology marches on.

fmian

Ummm... I thought it was called 4k because it's literally 4 times as many pixels as 1080p.
If it is, as he says, called 4k because it's near 4000px long, then 1080p would be called 2k, which is it is not, because it is incorrect.
Not very confidence inspiring when the COO gets something like this wrong.

Drexl

It's a little different for cinema vs. TV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution

LosingMyMind

What is xage?

E Unit

That's a complex question.

LosingMyMind

Like The Matrix?

Solid Snake

nooo...it's kind of like whether or not you let a stranger cum in your asshole while you're at the Steamworks bathhouse while you're also questioning what you prefer in that same timeframe. In other words...more complicated than The Matrix.

TheBang

Indeed. H.265 (aka HEVC) will be the next standard. I haven't seen anything else that comes close to the efficiency of the tests coming out of the draft HEVC standard. Compression is always a tradeoff between quality, filesize, and computational power required.

When H.264 was ratified in 2003, Intel was shipping Pentium 4 processors. Now we have multi-core, hyper-threaded, multi-processor machines that are an order of magnitude more powerful. A lot more processing power can be thrown at the compression algorithm's complexity to increase quality and decrease filesize.

zyzzle

Alright, so h.265 gets ratified, suppose it will require 4 or 8 modern CPU cores to compress 'efficiently'. There is another trade-off that nobody seems to be thinking about. Heat. And incresed power consumption; sure the power efficency per CPU core may beat the P4s, but most of those were only single-core. And, further down the line, component failure. How to possibly surmount the heat problem? Lots of noise (fans). Noboday in Home Theatre likes Noise unless it's coming from the movie itself!

TheBang

For devices like, um what should we call it, Super-Duper Blu-ray players, there will be ASIC's to handle the H.265 decoding, so it won't fall to a general purpose microprocessor to do the decoding. That's how it works in today's Blu-ray players too. You don't see P4's or Core 2 Duo's inside of them.

zyzzle

That is a good point. Yes, most BD standalones only consume 25-30 watts, whereas most modern CPUs alone consume anywhere from 95 to 160 watts of power.

scott182

There's a substantial difference between those charts. Any idea where the "new" chart is from?

Under the "old" chart, at 10 feet away from my 61" TV, I'm in "Benefit of 1080p starts to become noticeable". With the new chart, that's considered "8K enough". I've been using the first chart as justification for upgrading DVDs to Blu-ray, effectively future-proofing because at that distance it would be impossible to see any improvement with any higher resolution. Maybe that's been a bad assumption?