High bitrate 1080p > mid/low bitrate 4k and 8k.
I like 1440p but yeah hard agree.
Working in entertainment and broadcasting, you learn barely half of Americans have a 4K tv and it’s under half worldwide. Marketing makes you think that “everyone is doing it”
Most enterprise places are 1080p default and reqi people to go above and beyond to justify 4k screens.
Then we get into laptop’s still barely going about 720p so a lot of people have no idea what 4k would even bring them as even most streaming content still only in 1080 so not really noticeable for those who even have 4k screens
I’m still using a 1080p TV and I only plan to replace it if it breaks.
If you do, smart TVs are dumb and forgot how to TV
Wait, half have 4k‽
I don’t own a single 4k. Have four 1080p dumb TV’s. I will get a new one when one of these dies.
Out of all the displays in the house, there’s only one 4k computer monitor. The dumb tv is a 1080p, my other monitor is a 720p, then my partner has a DVI and a VGA monitor for his computer.
Even the bargain basement ones with horrible pictures have 4k resolution these days
Think it is an economy of scale issue.
Broadcast towers put out 1080p and satellite broadcasts 1080i. Filmmakers/streaming standard is 1080p. As a filmmaker (producer/ cinematographer) and broadcaster operator, you’re always encoding to scale down due to bandwidth and/or majority of the incapable most due to FCC rules/cost.
OLED and 4k is where it’s at.
Hell, OLED and high bitrate 1080 is probably good enough for me for the rest of my life.
Shitrate 4k and 1080p are all you get on streaming platforms. Hard to get good quality bitrates outside of I guess bluray and piracy.
bluray and piracy
I feel like that was implied in my comment ;-)
And piracy gets them from Bluray.
Now that that’s dying I’m afraid we’re gonna be stuck with streaming bitrates.
I guess we should buy more Blu-rays. But I don’t have a good space to library all of them… wait a sec… I have an idea…
I never choose higher bitrate releases. IDK why exactly. When you search for a movie and there’s a half dozen releases, you choose the groups you know, and the number of seeders, and usually end up with a 2gb to 4gb release size. The bitrate doesn’t really factor into my decision, partly I suppose because it’s always “good enough”, and partly because it’s not a reliable indicator of image quality anyway.
Once I upgraded to a 4k tv I started pulling 4K HDR versions. It can be hard to know how good the quality will be between 5GB, 10GB, 25GB and 50GB movies, because there are many substandard releases out there. Especially true with older content.
Newer stuff can make a difference, but let’s be realistic. It costs nothing to just download a few versions and see. :)
That’s kind of my point though.
I just don’t care enough about the quality.
I’d be surprised if the average person can differentiate 720p and 4k
Depends on the screen size and distance.
At a typical screen size and distance
I mean that’s vague.
I’d say it depends on the content too. On a computer monitor at typical size/distance? Yeah probably. Small text will look much much better.
I don’t think so. Average TV size: 40-50"? Average distance: 6 feet?
To be fair, recall how microscopic TVs used to be not so long ago.
I legitimately cannot tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, however I do wear glasses.
But 720 feels like garbage to me.
Wasn’t speaking about you.
Same, I have a 55" OLED and I game in 1080p. 4K looks a bit crisper, but my video card doesn’t like me when we do that.
People tend to forget bitrate when talking about image quality, and arguably it’s even more important than resolution. Even a 480p video can look great at a small screen if encoded with a good bitrate, and even a 4k video can look like shit if encoded with too low bitrate
I love OLED and can’t go back, hoping that we enter uniform OLED adoption at some point. I’d like to see them focus on lowering the price and raising the longevity of OLED displays. Doubt it on that first one though. Kind of a tangent but I also want to see what the future of e-ink displays are, especially with better colors and refresh rate.
I’ve steered away from OLED thus far due to concerns about burn-in. It just isn’t something I want to have to deal with.
It’s bad enough that I need to worry about write cycles on SSDs, but the advantage over HDDs is so overwhelming that I deal with it.
Longevity is a very important criteria for me, as I tend to upgrade infrequently and buy near top of the line for its time.
Mini LED is the way to go for longevity imo.
I play Guild Wars 2, and I’m worried if I bought an OLED I would end up with the UI permanently burned in. The technology just doesn’t seem compatible with games that feature a persistent UI.
My OLED is going on 8 years now and it has no signs of burn in. I don’t watch TV with permanent station logos though, if that is something that your OLED would have to withstand
future of e-ink displays
Call me batshit insane, I want them to figure out dual stack displays.
OLED for watching, E-Ink for showing art when the TV is off like Samsung’s ‘Frame TV’, but lower in power consumption and more life-like, both in the same TV set.
It’s about time the electronics industry as a whole realises that innovation for the sake of innovation is rarely a good thing
We traded 3D tv’s, which are amazing if you watch the right stuff, for 8k…
8k is great, but we need media in 8k to go with it.
Look, we can’t have TVs that last 15 years anymore!
We need to keep people buying every year or two. Otherwise line not go up! Don’t you understand that this is about protecting The Economy?!
Boomers economic policy is like if Issac Newton saw an apple falling from a tree, and came to the conclusion it would always accelerate at the same speed no matter what, even though the ground with the entire ass planet behind it is right fucking there.
Numbers can not constantly go up, it’s just that’s what was happening their whole lives and they can’t accept that their childhoods was a blip and not how things always were and always will be.
They just can’t wrap their heads around it. They have such shit tier empathy they can’t comprehend that they’re an exception.
A large number of the problems we currently face and will in the future come down to boomers being worse than their predecessors at grasping, understanding, and accepting their own impermanence and unimportance on the grand stage of reality.
Most of them need to have a series of existential crises or maybe read some fucking Satre so they can stop with the Me generation bullshit. It’s wild that the first generation to do LSD in mass is somehow the one that needs to experience ego death the most
It’s wild that the first generation to do LSD in mass
I want to say hippies were less than 1% of that generation, but for some reason I think it was recorded as 2-3% which would be a gross over-estimate.
But for every hippie you think of sticking daisies in rifles, there was 100 spitting on Black kids for going to the school they were legally required to go to.
It would be like if in 2080 they think we’re all catboys with blue hair and 37 facial piercings.
Sure, those people exist as a fringe demographic, but they’re not the norm.
Bmost hippies had more issues with peers their own age than their parents age, that part of the folk tale gets left out tho, because the people who want us to think they were hippies and “grew out of it” were the ones beating hippies for being different.
All they were ever trying to do was lie to younger generations in the hopes they’d confirm to decades old social norms. Like, it’s weird how many people still don’t understand the boomers just lie about shit instinctively. They grew up in a world filled with lead and are literally incapable of caring about logical inconsistencies. They want younger generations to think they were cool, so they just fucking lied about what they were like as a generation.
If you ever run into a real deal old hippie some day, ask them what the majority of people their age was like back then.
To be fair Boomers didn’t create this economic policy. Their parents elected Nixon, who broke the Bretton Woods agreement “temporarily”, and then we adopted Keynesian macroeconomic policy afterwards to justify it.
Inb4 someone regurgitates a defense of this “boomer” policy and proves that it’s not just them and never was. It’s always been the rich and the their loyal servants.
FireWire got killed too soon.
Too right, brother
it was way too ahead of its time.
Wha?
AFAIK FireWire is part of the Thunderbolt protocol, you can get FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt adapters. Apple even used to sell one.
Apple killed Firewire 4 years before Lightning came along.
??? My 2012 MacBook Pro had FireWire, that’s the year Lightning came out…
Apple announced it was moving away from Firewire in 2008
It’s not even innovation, per say. It’s just Big Number Go Up.
Nobody seems to want to make a TV that makes watching TV more pleasant. They just want to turn these things into giant bespoke advertising billboards in your living room.
Show me the TV manufacturer who includes an onboard ad blocker. That’s some fucking innovation.
The galaxy brain move is buying an old dumb tv for a pittance and use it for watching Jellyfin/Plex/stream from a browser with uBlock Origin/DNS filtering – all running on some relative’s “obsolete” smart toaster from last year that they happily gift you because “the new version’s bagel mode IS LIT – pun intended – but it needs the 128 gb DDR7 ram of the new model, can barely toast on the old one any more”.
I think this just comes down to human nature. Give people (engineers, execs) a metric that looks like a good proxy for performance and they will overcommit on that metric as it is a safer bet than thinking outside the box. I think the incremental improvements in deep learning with all those benchmarks are a similar situation.
You can’t really find a dumb TV anymore. I might see how big of a monkey I can find when I’m ready to upgrade, but I doubt I’ll find one big enough and cheap enough.
I hooked my computer up to the HDMI and have used that as my primary interface.
It’s not perfect, but it screens out 95% of bullshit
That doesn’t, unless you’ve blocked your TV from network access, because they use ACR - Automated Content Recognition - that literally scans what is being displayed over your hdmi port and then sells it off to advertisers.
I think you missed the part where the TV doesn’t have access to the network.
They can connect to open WiFi spots and just ignore the fact that you didn’t connect it.
Just don’t give the TV your wifi password, boom dumb TV.
That won’t save you anymore. My boss bought a smallish smart TV in contravention of my explicit instructions for use as a CCTV monitor because it was “cheap.” It nags you on power up with a popup whining about not being able to access the internet, and if you don’t feed it your Wifi password it will subsequently display that same popup every 30 minutes or so requiring you to dismiss it again. And again. And again. Apparently the play is to just annoy you into caving and letting it access your network.
Instead I packed it up and returned it. Fuck that.
If you are at a business you should have an access point or router that is capable of blocking specific devices from WAN access. But I would create a new segmented network, block that network from WAN access entirely, put it on its own VLAN, and then connect the TV to that network.
I’d assume it nags whenever it can’t connect to the home server, and just says “network”.
So when they go out of business any remaining units will nag forever.
You can use your router or access point tools to check what address it’s trying to resolve and then set up a redirect to a device that can respond with a fake response.
Even if it was, the streamings everyone’s using crush down the bitrate so bad it’d barely look better than 4k anyway.
There’s no 8k content, and only recently do standard connectors support 8k at high refresh rates.
There’s barely any actual 4K content you can consume.
I’ve got a nice 4k mini LED tv with a 4k Blu-ray player and there’s plenty of excellent 4k content but it’s a niche market because most people aren’t using physical media for movies. 4k streaming is garbage compared to UHD Blu-ray.
Which makes sense because even 1080p streaming is garbage compared to blu-ray.
Preach. I got gifted a 4k bluray player and was absolutely blown away by how good it looks compared to streaming.
There’s barely any actual 4K content you can consume.
Honestly a little surprised the IMAX guys didn’t start churning out 4k+ content given that they’ve been in the business forever.
But I guess “IMAX in your living room” isn’t as sexy when the screen is 60" rather than 60’
IMAX is 4K or less content. Its edge is special projection that can look good and brighter on huge screens.
Only imax film prints are significantly better than anything else
You don’t even need IMAX for 4K; ordinary 35mm film can normal scan to a nice 4K video. Films shot on the 65mm IMAX cameras would probably make good 8K content, but most of that was educational films, not what most people apparently want to watch all the time.
The digital IMAX projections were actually a step backwards in resolution.
Films shot on the 65mm IMAX cameras would probably make good 8K content, but most of that was educational films, not what most people apparently want to watch all the time.
Sure. But the cameras exist. You can use them for other stuff.
Hateful Eight was filmed in 70mm, and while it wasn’t Tarantino’s best work it certainly looked nice.
65mm is a gulf from 15/65 though. Much harder to shoot in IMAX format.
IMAX film is equivalent to 12K. Their digital laser projectors are only 4K.
Films shot on the 65mm IMAX cameras would probably make good 8K content
So there’s still hope that they might release The Last Buffalo in 8k 3D sometime in the future? Got it. :)
They don’t want IMAX in your living room, they want IMAX in the IMAX theater, where you pay a premium for their service.
There’s barely any actual 4K content you can consume.
Ironically there actually is if you bother pirating content because that’s the only crowd that will share full 4k Dolby Vision + Dolby Atmos/DTS-X BluRay rips.
Aside from that though, even 4k gaming is a struggle because GPU vendors went into the deep end of frame generation, which also coincidentally is the same mistake lots of TV OEMs already made.
People really need to understand a lot of what “smart” TVs do is upscale the “4k” signal to something actually resembling real 4k.
Like how some 4k torrents are 3GB, and then a 1080p of the same movie is 20gb.
It’s “worse” resolution, but it looks miles better because it’s upscaling real 1080 to 4k instead of taking existing shitty 4k and trying to make it look better without just juicing the resolution.
So we don’t need 8k.content for 8k.tvs to be an incentive. We need real 4k media, then 8ks TV would show a real improvement.
Yeah, you’re talking about bitrate. A lot of the 4k content is encoded using more efficient codecs, but if it’s sourced from the streaming services the bitrate is so abysmal it’s usually a tossup between the 1080p or 4k stream. At least the 4k usually has hdr these days which is appreciable.
Yeah. A 1080p Bluray clocks in around 20GB. A 4K bluray is 60-80GB.
If you’re downloading something smaller it’s probably lower quality
There’s barely any actual 4K content you can consume
I feel like that’s not true. But you’ve gotta try. If you’re streaming it, chances are it’s not really any better. 4K Bluray (or rips of them…) though? Yeah it’s good. And since film actually has 8K+ resolution old movies can be rescanned into high resolution if the original film exists.
Supposedly Sony Pictures Core is one streaming service that can push nearly 4K Bluray bitrates… but you’ve gotta have really good internet. Like pulling 50-80GB in the span of a movie runtime.
You’re probably aware of this since you mentioned bitrate, but a lot of 4K streaming services use bitrates that are too low to capture much more detail at 4K compared to a lower resolution. A lot of games will recommend/effectively require upscaling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) to achieve good performance at 4K. All of this is still maybe better than 1440p, but it shows 4K is still kind of hard to make full use of.
I wish they didn’t feel the need to fake it with upscaling. In my experience upscaling looks like shit every time, whether it’s a video or game. Most of the time a good 1080p video with good bit rate will look way better than a 4k upscale.
Not true on paper but true in practice. Most people don’t buy/use Blurays (or any other physical media) anymore to the point that retailers aren’t even bothering to stock them on the shelves these days. Their days are certainly numbered and then all we’ll be left with is low quality 4k streaming.
My vision is failing faster than resolutions are improving and most of the time I can’t even tell the difference between 4k and 1080p. More interested in higher FPS content becoming more commonplace.
Innovate only when it’s necessary. In the meantime, perfect what exists.
The only real innovation after 1080p for TV was HDR, sound stuff, 60-120hz, and upscaling to 4k.
4k is enough, 60fps is enough, no smart or AI stuff is perfectly fine…
What about reducing the energy consumption? That’s an innovation I want.
Are you aware that reducing the energy consumption on monitors is competely irrelevant compared to the giant data centers coming up now, taking as much as power as a full city?
One typical AI data center ≈ 1 TWh/year ≈ the electricity used by 100 000 average homes annually.
A very large AI data center under construction ≈ 20 TWh/year ≈ electricity for ~2 million homes annually.
Fun times isnt it.
I hope you mean 60hz is enough for TVs. Because I certainly don’t want that regression on my monitor 😄
Plot twist: because all we need is 16K.
Nuh… We have had 16k for at least 8 years
No kidding, we’ve had 16K since the 1980s.
640K ought to be enough for anyone
CRT is the future!
Maybe they should stop forcing this antiquated TV License scam. For those who don’t know, the UK pushes for a TV License to watch Live TV though most people don’t watch BBC anymore. Though I bet they will try to find a way to include Netflix and more in the TV License. EDIT: I agree the BBC should be funded though they are not a perfect entity and state controlled media is very bad especially for journalism. I think they are going about advertising the license in the wrong way and there is a lot of evidence of harassment from letters and visits to get a tv license even if you don’t have a tv!
state controlled media is very bad
Hard disagree: if there’s one thing we’ve seen over the many decades, BBC News for all its various stumbles has done a good job of setting a high bar for all the commercial news TV in the UK.
Just compare it to the absolute trainwreck that is US TV news media. Sky News for example is a Murdoch station just like Fox News, and yet they don’t have even a fraction of the amount of crazy on there because the British people have come to expect their news presenters to act like adults and make at least some attempt at impartiality.
Even if you don’t like the BBC’s output, you still get the benefit from its effect on the independents, and it’s not like anyone’s forcing you to watch it.
Well the BBC is technically forcing us to watch it. Many people don’t watch TV at all but constantly receive threatening letters complaigning that we are not paying for a TV License that we don’t use. They want every single household to have a TV and a license even if we don’t watch the BBC. So that is a big problem with a forced narrative from the BBC. I do agree that they do a lot of things well but it’s often too little too late. However, my main issue is not the quality of state controlled media or the ethical problems with that but rather the fact that they keep forcing us to pay for it. Even if we don’t use it.
Literally everything that is paid for with tax dollars wodks like that. Did you think you got a refund in the mail if you don’t drive on a particular road.
Likewise NPR/PBS in the US. They’re really the tits.
NPR has gone to shit since the Bush admin. It parrots way too much government propaganda. Look to Pacifica.
Government funded news programs are generally a good thing IF they’re mostly their own entity and importantly as long as they don’t block other sources. I think bbc being funded is good
BBC being funded is good but state controlled media is very bad. BBC is highly regulated and controlled by the crown and the British gov. How they push the TV License is very invasive and offputting to the point of harassment and threats. Surely there has to be a better way to do this. They should try to make people want a license not claiming that we HAVE to have it. That’s all I am trying to say.
Maybe they should just bill a household regardless and dispense with the extra nonsense then you would just have to pay and couldn’t go on about it
It’s good to have it, all media is state sponsored, at least one of them is by the local state. You want BBC to be sold and owned by KGB nepo babies like the independent or evening standard?
What are you going to attack next? The queen? Mary fucking Poppins?! Leave our feudal traditions alone! XXX
As an example of the system being reworked into a better one: Germany’s equivalent not only finances public broadcast channels, but also youtubers through the program FUNK. Granted, a lion’s share still goes into the old TV channels, but at least that includes the French/German channel Arte, which has some top notch content (though usually documentaries) that it regularly uploads onto YouTube.
That is interesting. I like that they used YouTube channels. I feel like TV is sadly a dying platform though I do hate the day that TV and Cinema die. Unfortunately it only happens cause TV License people dug their own grave. Also, there is not enough new stuff to watch on TV with every streaming service putting out so many platforms to watch on. Though maybe I am being too cynnical and I apolagize.
I wouldn’t say you’re too cynical with that view. I mean, the 2 German public broadcast channels (ARD, ZDF) are under constant fire for basically catering to an audience that is slowly dying out - both metaphorically and physically. Sure, some of these shows still have some popularity with younger generations, but that is few and far between. It’s pretty much the same idea that plagues big corporations - change is scary as it poses a risk, so they avoid it - even if they literally have nothing to lose.
And I agree that the fractured streaming environment made it ever harder to license content. However, I don’t think they should focus on licensing content to begin with. Instead, offer more grants for independent studios to create publicly available movies and shows. I mean, as we speak, Glitch is funding multiple shows to be viewed for free on YouTube. Why can’t public broadcast channels do that more too?
The TV licence funds the BBC’s 10 TV channels, 10 national radio stations, 6 regional radio stations, 50 local radio stations, 14 regional news operations, the biggest news gathering organisation in the world, 4 orchestras and music groups, world-leading R&D labs, S4C, local democracy reporters, and the World Service. It broadcasts in 39 languages and outputs 140 hours of news per day. It is also about to fund youtube creators. It’s cheaper than the German tax.
Honestly, we have way more work to do when it comes to brightness, contrast, and colour.
I’d rather a 1080p screen that has OLED infinite contrast and over 1000 nits of sustained brightness to be fully viewable during the day, over a resolution bump.
I’m fine with 100 nits and good contrast, better yet a e-paper alternative. Who wants to stare in a lightbulb all day?
Someone who wants to be able to see the screen during the day when there’s sunlight in the room, or someone who wants to be able to see the full spectrum of visual fidelity during a movie.
Its not like you’re going to have a blank white image on screen all day, but if you want to accurately portray the contrast between say, the shadow of the jungle, and the bright colours of a bird that has sunlight glinting off it, then you need to be able to have the brightest parts be very bright and the darkest parts be very dark, because that’s what reality looks like, the outdoors gets brighter then 100 nits.
The University of Cambridge’s display resolution calculator, which is based on a study from researchers at the university’s Department of Computer Science and Technology and Meta, funded by Meta, and published in Nature in October, suggests that your eyes can only make use of 8K resolution on a 50-inch screen if you’re viewing it from a distance of 1 meter (3.3 feet) or less. Similarly, you would have to be sitting pretty close (2–3 meters/6.6–9.8 feet) to an 80-inch or 100-inch TV for 8K resolution to be beneficial. The findings are similar to those from RTINGs.com.
This is known since at least 2010, because our eyes are limited in optical resolution and in how big a surface we see.
Fuck.
Now instead of each new generation of TVs being slightly higher in resolution some god damn business tech executive is going to focus on some god damn bullshit to try and change or add which is going be absolutely fucking ridiculous or pointless and annoying like AI television shit or TV gaming or fuck my life. Smart TVs are bad enough but they can’t help themselves they need to change or add shit all the fucking time to “INNOVATE!!!” and show stockholder value.
Resolution was something easy and time consuming but we can’t rely on that keeping them from fucking TV up any more.
