[Melatonic]

Some of that info is now considered outdated.

In addition there's a lot more benefits your missing. 4K will be streamed at a higher overall bitrate with smaller artifacts and noise.

In addition HDR and 10 bit / 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 color can be huge differences in image quality on the right TV and source.

For the first example you could theoretically take a 4K signal and downscale to 1080P before display and theoretically get a lot of the benefits (assuming the person is far from their TV as you say). That being said a lot of people do sit closer and have larger TVs. And many people also have better vision than average.

Jumping from 4K to 8K I would say the differences are much less important given the massive file size increase. Many nicer cameras even only shoot in around "6K". Shooting higher resolution does allow you to do a bit of cropping and recomposing in post however which is nice. And of course things like stabilisation.

4K on phones though I think is truly dumb. Just wasting heat and battery life

[jorvi]

The bitrate thing is certainly true, but at the bitrates that Netflix streams I'd almost rather have the same bitrate for a 1080P stream and then use my Shield to upscale it.

As for the color thing, 4:4:4 has very little material released in that format. And there's a reason we chose to compress 4:2:2 instead of 2:2:4, humans are just much less sensitive to color than to brightness. That's why HDR is so nice, the extra brightness steps.

People can certainly have better vision than 20/20 (which is taken as standard, although it is above average already).

And yup, 8K is unnecessary aside from maybe cinema front row seats. And 4K phones are indeed stupid haha. Interestingly enough, for example the Deck is plenty sharp at 720P which I personally would have never expected until owning it.

[Melatonic]

If only it were that simple - unfortunately "4K" also comes with higher bitrates (if you fall back to 1080P it will just max out at a much lower bitrate)

Most content that is not 10 bit will also be 4:2:0 - you are right that 4:4:4 is overkill but 4:2:0 does sorta suck.

It's really about the overall the package

[klausa]

You're confusing "benefits of playing 4K-mastered media" and "benefits of having more pixels on the panel"; which is what the original point was about.