Hacker News Reader

Comment by wjoe | Hacker News Reader

"2K" is usually used to describe 2560x1440 or similar monitors. I find these ideal personally. I don't notice much difference much from higher resolution than that, gaming at 4K requires high end hardware, and scaling between different resolution monitors is a pain.

1440p seems like a good sweet spot between the two. But yes, 2K is a silly name for it.

View on HN

The term "2K" came from the film industry and meant 2048x1080 (cropped to 1998x1080 for a 1.85:1 aspect ratio) . When 1920x1080 started to show up these where generally grouped in under the "2K" banner. I've never heard anyone use the term 2K when discussing 2560x1440 monitors.

I'd personally just avoid using film spec terms for TV and computers and just stick to the old FullHD, Ultra Wide, UltraHD terms. Film tech is always a bit of an island doing their own thing for encoding, captions, hardware, etc.

Attaching terms like "2K" to a computer screen invokes legacy compatibility horror feelings for me.

Neither have I.

For displays, <value>i and <value>p are used to indicate vertical resolution. For displays, <value>k is used to indicate approximate horizontal resolution. I've not seen any other usage.

For projectors, especially theater projectors, I have seen 2K used to refer to 2048 horizontal resolution, and 4K used to indicate 4096 horizontal resolution. Projectors do not have the same aspect ratio as monitors, however. DCI 2K is 2048x1080, while "2K" Full HD is 1920x1080. DCI 4K is 4096x2160, while UHD 4K is 3840x2160.

For film, 2k & 4K describe the horizontal resolution as you state, but the vertical resolution is determined by the aspect ratio (1.85, 2.35, 2.40, etc). HD & UHD are fixed to a 1.78/16x9 aspect ratio which explains the difference in widths.

Yes, but any recent film (in the US at least) should be following DCI resolutions if they want to work on a digital projector. The native resolution for 2K DCI is 2048x1080. If there's a different aspect ratio for a 2K film, then either the horizontal resolution will be 2048 or the vertical resolution with be 1080. Thus, 1.85:1 is 1998x1080, and 2.39:1 is 2048x858. Obviously, you can do something else if you want, but then it's not 2K DCI. It may be outside the digital projector's native display resolution. It would be like pushing a 1440p movie to a 1080p monitor. It's going to look weird even if it has the correct aspect ratio because of mandatory down scaling the monitor has to do.

You can't really have a 2K film whose resolution is larger than 2048x1080 if you're following the DCI spec, and AFAIK the DCI spec is the only spec that actually uses the name "2K" as the official name for the resolution. That's the only point I'm making.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com