Hacker News Reader

Comment by favadi | Hacker News Reader

Or people who argued that "4k is pointless, you can't see the different with 2k anw".

This really depends on the size of the screen. For most laptops, I'd argue that 4k is useless; 1440p is high-res enough that you get perfect clarity anyway.

For 83" TVs you obviously need more pixels to get a good viewing experience because you don't position yourself several meters in front of the screen to make the pixels unnoticable.

For gaming or videos I actually can’t tell the difference between 4K and 1440p. For text rendering I absolutely can.

As an aside, many 4k/1440p videos are not really 4k or 1440p, vs how we would classify a 4k/1440p monitor. Video is mostly 4k/1440p light levels, but less than that w.r.t. color information.

A common video subsampling setup is 4:2:0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling

In addition, common video compression techniques (at least the simple ones that I could still understand) basically reconstruct blocks of pixels. Reconstruction is lossy, at best.

If I had to guess, something similar could be done in games as part of their optimizations.

Something similar is done in video games through two technologies (in addition to colourspace trickery): DLSS and “dynamic resolution”

I think even for phones anything above 1080p, is kinda pointless. Just a drain on the battery.

For me, there's only a difference for the text console. For GUIs I have to halve the resolution to make things usable so it doesn't really help anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com