Your TV Is Too Good for You
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
He wonders why this is, muses on cultural history and doesn't come up with a precise answer.
I propose the answer is simple: the prices of TVs and streaming services are unrelated. Hardware tends to trend down in price as we get better at making it.
Content is not the same. Most of the content you watch on streaming services is owned and produced by an oligopoly. Streaming disrupted their lucrative cable model, and they want to get its prices and profits back up to the peak levels of cable. Since they're an oligopoly and they collude with each other (formally or informally), there's not much you can do about it. It will mean 4K is irrelevant for many people who don't want to indulge their latest price hiking tactic.
What happens in such an abnormal environment of over supply will never make any sense.
Seems screen-wise the new frontier is brightness and HDR.
I fear it's a tough sell though.
Screen size and resolution are firmly implanted in consumers' minds as THE metrics to rule all metrics.
Just like other flawed metrics like horsepower for cars, megapixels for cameras, "watts" for amplifiers and powered speakers, and so on. Hope I'm wrong!
As much as numbers are universal they seem to be quickly fatiguing the general public... if there isn't a _perceptible_ improvement! Regardless of units; and I like that about non-engineering - normal people: if it isn't perceptibly better then... _whatever, next!_.
(and I certainly didn't by my current camera-device for the megapixels)
and I like that about non-engineering - normal people:
if it isn't perceptibly better then... _whatever, next!_
There are a lot of things that are "perceptibly better" that only reveal themselves over time.
Probably the best example would be the benefits of well-designed physical controls in cars, relative to poorly designed touch interfaces. Unless you're really attuned to UI design it's hard to understand how aggravating bad touch interfaces are until you've already bought the car and spent some significant time with them.
Same with things like boots. A poorly made boot is most definitely going to be perceptibly worse over time even if you are are not a "boot nerd" but it is hard to discern this up front.
A display with great HDR support is kind of like that. It's most definitely perceptibly better even if the viewer doesn't care about tech crap. But it's harder sell.
Personally, since you can't really buy 1440p TVs, makes sense to me to keep 1080p TV if you have one, but buy a 4k if you're getting a new TV.
Good chuckle here and """I'm offended!!!""". I'm not. mp3 128 in video is a crappy 480p stuff - bearable, but not _enjoyable_. 1080p on an appropriate display would kinda work as mp3 v0 - good enough for _almost_ all.
But then again, I have not spent any time with 4k content on an appropriate display. I may stay mistaken until!
I also didn’t notice that my wife had bought Succession and The Outsider on DVD instead of Blu-Ray. The picture quality for TV box-sets on DVD seems to have somehow improved over recent years – or maybe my visual acuity is getting worse as I get older. :(
It feels like the 4K rendering resolution often outpaces the quality of the assets being rendered. Similarly, back in ye olden days, I felt a lot of early 3D games looked better at 320x240 at high framerates than 640x480 at lower framerates.
Obviously that moment has long passed. I'm sure it will be the same for me with 4K vs. 2K vs. 1080p as the technology and production values progress.
https://downloads.videolan.org/testing/vlc-rtx-upscaler/#:~:...
Source: I own a FullHD 40” TV set and a 43” 4k monitor. I once tried swapping them and watched 4k footage, and quality difference was not significant IMHO.
But you can notice pixels at fullhd on larger screens ofc - noticed them on a 55” and a 65” TV set.
It's definitely not worth even the ~$500 we paid for this TV to get a new one just at the moment.