[jd20]

What I find interesting, is the parallel in movie content, where 4K UHD content just became available late last year (while 4K movie content was available earlier, all the stuff I'd seen was poorly encoded or heavily compressed). I see a lot of people on AVSForum complaining that there's absolutely no visual difference between 4K or 1080p, sitting on a couch at normal distances, based on scientific arguments of the human eye's resolving power, or their own subjective experiments.

Given that the market reception to 4K TV's and UHD players seems to have been tepid at best, I find it interesting that Microsoft thinks 4K will be such a huge draw to consumers. Is it just bragging rights (my 4K's bigger than your 1080p)? 4K rendering will really make the 1080p look that much better? People playing these things will sit 1-2 feet from the screen? Or maybe VR headsets will benefit the most?

[Strom]

Definitely interesting. Regarding the human eye, it varies greatly from person to person how well they see. However it's not even only about the eye itself, but also how well suited & trained [1] your brain is to interpreting the signals.

I personally have always had perfect vision, and have always been able to notice even fairly subtle differences in resolution. My brother also has perfect vision in the classic 20/20 sense, but has to inspect closely to tell apart even 720p & 1080p movies. Our ability to notice differences in bitrate is even more far apart. [2] It's not even only about picture quality, but also about refresh rates. I can tell the difference between 100 Hz & 144 Hz, and I'll even notice bad frame pacing on an otherwise stable framerate. At the same time I have a friend who didn't notice anything different about the 48 fps variant of The Hobbit compared to other 24 fps movies.

It probably has a lot to do with what we spend our time doing. In that I've spent most of my life hunting for better picture quality & higher frame rates. Compared to the average person I must've spent an unbelivable amount of time thinking about & observing picture quality & frame rate. Thus I have probably developed a skill for this.

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[1] The training can be an implicit side-effect of other activities.

[2] Interestingly this is for video bitrate. The reverse is true for audio bitrate. My brother being a lifelong audiophile claims to hear the difference between even 320 kbps MP3 & FLAC.

[__david__]

Yeah, I have a nice 4K tv and I still think 4k is a bit of a red herring. I even moved my couch a foot closer. The only thing I noticed is that I can now distinguish between 720p and 1080p where I couldn't on my old 1080p tv.

I think 4k is more important on 25" to 30" computer monitors that are perched just a couple feet away. I'm not convinced it makes a difference on a wall mounted TV.

I think the more exciting bits of progress are the wide color gamut and HDR.