Is 4K a game changer?

[Anthony P]

Originally Posted by Hypnosifl

Of course even when your eyes are optically capable of resolving individual pixels you may not notice them because the color gradations aren't sharp enough for your brain to notice a distinction, or other reasons having to do with how visual signals from the eye are processed by the brain. But I think when people talk about "resolving pixels" they are just talking about optics--obviously if the screen size/distance combination is such that two neighboring pixels get smeared together into a single blob when the light hits your retina (due to diffraction at the lens), then there's no way you're going to be able to resolve even smaller details if that screen is replaced by a 4K screen with the same size/distance combination. And any lens, including the one in the human eye, has a minimum angular separation in details that can be resolved--see here. It's these sorts of optical considerations that are used to judge which size/distance combinations will allow people to make out details smaller than those of pixels on a 2K screen and which combinations won't allow that, see this page.

yes there is more than just pixel size that matter, that is the point. Most (and even the charts in your link) tend to under value the difference.

That is why I like as an example to go the opposite route (since let's face it visual acuity is individual)

if you take content with film grain at any resolution and from where you sit you can't tell it is there but if you move closer you can see it, then you are sitting too far to resolve a pixel of that size on that display, since the human mind will be very good at focusing on it. If on the other hand you see it where you are sitting then your eyes can resolve it and you will benefit by more resolution

a different test is by using a black scene with a single white pixel in the middle, if it looks 100% black you can't resolve more but if you can tell that white pixel is there you can resolve more than you have today.

yes, maybe if they are very similar shades it might be hard to tell they are different pixels but
1) you should not be able to tell an image has any pixels
2) that is not the only thing that will happen in all the films.

what I find is most of the tables and charts (when using the tests described above) are wrong and under estimate what people can see using what I described above). Simply because they start with what I believe is a wrong premise. Let's take your Red link where they talk about the Snellen chart 9the one with the letters). For someone like me that wears glasses and had to deal with often

1) sometimes you can read some of the letters on a line but not others. From a functional perspective the details are too small (not reliable) but from a pixel perspective it would be wrong to say I can't see the difference since on some letters I can. this idea of all or nothing used to make charts based on pixel angularity would only work if it was all or nothing

2) obviously with TVs it is the same thing but the chart moves in large increments, so if someone can read one line completely but not the next one it can't really say anything about anything in between. 20/20 means that the person can see at 20' what a normal person can see at 20' but 20/40 means that person who is still at 20' can read the line representing a normal person at 40' and 20/10 that that person can see at 20' what a normal person can see at 10' but there is no line 20/20.1 or 20/19.1 so precisoion is assumed for something that is not precise (and the same for the TV, maybe 4K is not needed for Joe's set-up but that does not mean that 3K would not help or 3.5k or 2.5 or any resolution more than 1080p.

The point about compression might be relevant for blu rays that aren't mastered as well, but I have my doubts that the average person could notice a difference between a well-mastered blu ray shown on a 2K screen and the uncompressed version of the same movie shown on the same 2K screen (presumably fed to it by some source that can store more data than a blu ray).

if you have a 1080p camcorder that can capture uncompressed video, you would be amazed how much is lost even when re-encoded in BD format, but obviously BD is the best we have and most other formats are much worst. But my point was not about compression but a simple reality if you look at this optical illusion



obviously there are no triangles but your brain wants to assume there is a triangle with a black outline and three black circles and there is a white triangle on top of them (which is why you don't see the rest of the circles or the full black outline. The point was that the brain likes what it likes and so it can be good at tricking you if you don't account for the tricks it can play on you. Compression artifacts are that way, even though they are sometimes glaring and obvious (by people that know what they are seeing) they can go semi-unnoticed by people that don't know better. That is why a long time ago I decided to never help anyone to see them (because once you learn how to see them and that they are un natural your brain does not try and hide from you what your eyes see). I brought it up because resolution is the same way, I was OK with DVD until I started watch BDs and then what was wrong in the pictures before became obvious. Now maybe with 4K it won't be as bad, but only time will tell because right now like the image above our brains want to find that 1080p image acceptable and it will assume the details that are missing just like it did with DVD before BD.