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Comment by Doublon | Hacker News Reader

> While the step from 1080p 1440p to 4K is a visible difference

I even doubt that. My experience is, on a 65" TV, 4K pixels become indistinguishable from 1080p beyond 3 meters. I even tested that with friends on the Mandalorian show, we couldn't tell 4K or 1080p apart. So I just don't bother with 4K anymore.

Of course YMMV if you have a bigger screen, or a smaller room.

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If your Mandalorian test was via streaming, that's also a huge factor. 4K streaming has very poor quality compared to 4K Blu-ray, for instance.

Which is a point in itself: bitrate can matter more than resolution.

For reasonable bitrate/resolution pairs, both matter. Clean 1080P will beat bitrate starved 4K, especially with modern upscaling techniques, but even reasonable-compression 4K will beat good 1080P because there's just more detail there. Unfortunately, many platforms try to mess with this relationship, like YouTube forcing 4K uploads to get better bitrates, when for many devices a higher rate 1080P would be fine.

I'm curious, for the same mb per second, how is the viewing quality of 4k vs 1080p? I mean, 4k shouldn't be able to have more detail per se in the stream given the same amount of data over the wire, but maybe the way scaling and how the artifacts end up can alter the perception?

If everything is the same (codec, bitrate, etc), 1080P will look better in anything but a completely static scene because of less blocking/artifacts.

But that’s an unrealistic comparison, because 4K often gets a better bitrate, more advanced codec, etc. If the 4K and 1080P source are both “good”, 4K will look better.

Yeah, I have a hard time believing that someone with normal eyesight wouldn't be able to tell 1080p and 4k blu-rays apart. I just tested this on my tv, I have to get ridiculously far before the difference isn't immediately obvious. This is without the HDR/DV layer FWIW.

Try comparing a 4K vs 1080p that were created from the same master, like a modern Criterion restoration.

Without HDR the differences are negligible or imperceptible at a standard 10' viewing distance.

I'll take it one step further: a well-mastered 1080p Blu-Ray beats 4K streaming hands down every time.

10 feet is pretty far back for all but the biggest screens, and at closer distances, you certainly should be able to see a difference between 4K and 1080P.

The Magsafe cord on a Macbook charger is 6'. It's not as far as you think.

For the 30 to 40 degree FoV as recommended by SMPTE, 10ft is further back than is recommended for all but like a 98in screen, so yes, it’s too far back.

It very much depends on the particular release. For many 4K releases you don't actually get that much more detail because of grain and imperfect focus in the original film.

there are so many tricks you can do as well, resolution was never really the issue, sharpness and fidelity isn't the same as charming and aesthetically pleasing

The person was referring to gaming where most PC players are sitting closer than 3 metres from their screen.

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