Are 4k TVs Worth It?

K TV. There are a lot of different names for it, and we'll also touch on other stuff like eight K t V. Which is it twice as good as four K TV? You'll have to wait and find out. But it's really this episode not so much about the technology behind what makes four K and eight K television possible, but rather to kind of explain what are the differences between the those the ultra high definition formats and our current high definition formats and even older standard definition formats.

What has changed? Are those changes meaningful? Should you run out and buy a four K television set right now? So? I'll talk about times where u h D makes sense and times where it might not make sense, where it may be indistinguishable from an HD set. But be warned this episode shall also be fraught with opinions fraught, I say, and those opinions will be mine, but I'll do my best to maintain a semi objective point of view for

the most part. Just keep in mind that some of this is based off my own observation, and your own experience could be probably not dramatically different from mine, but different enough to be significant. So, uh, this is a little more of an opinion piece than what I typically do for tech stuff unless I get, you know, my

dander up about something like net neutrality. Now, if you were to be super super cynical, and I am not this person, but if you were super cynical, you might say, four k's just a technology that's being pushed on us by TV manufacturers because they need a way to generate customers. They need to find a product that appeals to customers so that they can sell stuff and make money, and four K is just the gimmick that they're hitching their cart to. This case, the gimmick is a four K horse.

I guess, well, how do you convince your customers that they need to upgrade to a new television. You've got to come up with something that creates a new demand, right, because TVs tend to be fairly expensive. There might not be the most expensive thing that you purchase. A car is going to be more expensive, but they can be significantly expensive. So it's an investment. How do you convince people to cough up the dough to make an investment in a new television if their old TV is still

perfect in working order. You have to come up with things that add value to the product. So if you're trying to convince people who are typically waiting several years between television purchases to upgrade, you gotta figure out, well,

what what's the hook? Where do I get them? And in the past we've seen a couple of UH misfires from the television industry and trying to create the sort of value added features in televisions that haven't necessarily paid off the way the industry wanted it to UH like. About a decade ago, TV companies began to experiment by making television's smart, but those first few smart TVs were awfully dumb. There was an overreliance on widgets and those

were mostly irritating not helpful. Over time, companies got better at implementing smart features, and today smart TVs are pretty standard in stores and there their features are a little more useful than the old ones were for the most part. Again, it all depends upon who's making the user interface and how it's implemented with the television and the remote control

are a lot of factors that come into play. I still do not own a smart TV, despite being a lover of technology and the fact that I love new and interesting toys, I haven't purchased a smart TV. The last time I bought a TV, it was before the

smart TV craze had really taken off. It it started, but you can still find plenty of televisions that were not smart TVs, and they were slightly cheaper, and I didn't really want any of the smart TVs that were on the market back when I was last purchasing and television, so I skipped it. Uh, these days, I might not skip it. But I'll get more into that a little

bit later. Then, for several years, television companies were really trying to push three D technology, and this was one of those sort of transparent efforts to create a value for the customer that ultimately fizzled out. Customers just didn't respond to it. There was a lot of apathy on the part of consumers. We just didn't really see a huge need for three D television. Part of the problem was that without experiencing it, you can't really know whether

or not that purchase is going to be worthwhile. So you would need to go to some place and try out at three D television with good three D content before you could decide is this for me? And that requires a lot more effort. It also, uh didn't have a whole lot of content right Like, you couldn't find

a lot of three D content. There were three D movies, so you could go out and buy blue rays or even get some streaming ones that were compatible with certain types of three D television's, but there wasn't a whole lot of content out there, so you felt like you were buying into an ecosystem without a whole lot of stuff to actually watch. It was kind of a worst case scenario for three D technology. And these days you don't see it touted as a major feature in television.

Is there's still a lot of TVs that are three D capable, but often that's just one little bullet point on a list and is not being touted as the main feature of a television. It's rare that you find a TV that pushes itself as a three D television. And now let's talk about resolution. To do that, we're gonna start earlier than four K or even HD. This is all about laying the groundwork, which you longtime listeners of tech stuff. No, that's kind of how I like

to do things. So to begin, we're talking about image sharpness or resolution. That is really the focus, no pun intended of this episode. This isn't exactly the same thing as image quality. They're not synonymous. It is a factor in image quality, but not the only one. Other factors also determine whether or not the image you see on a screen is good or isn't good. The resolution is important,

but it's not the end all be all. Two other important things to consider would be color representation and contrast. For example, those are very important elements in picture quality, and without them, if you don't have very good contrast, or if you don't have good color representation, the images might be in really sharp focus, but they're still not gonna look as good as a television that has really

good contrast and really good color representation. In fact, there's some people who argue if you were to get two sets together, and one of them is in four K and one of those in HD, and the HD one has really good color representation in contrast, but the four K has four times the resolution. Arguably that you would probably think that HD set is actually giving you the better picture because of that amazing color representation. More on

that a little bit later as well. In a way, resolution really comes down to being a selling point, similar to the way megapixels are for digital cameras. Uh My producer Dylan could tell you that just because one camera might be advertised as taking images with a larger number of megapixels, it does not necessarily mean that those images are going to be more pleasing to the eye than a camera that has maybe fewer megapixels in the images

it produces. There are other factors that matter a lot, but megapixels are an easy way to point at differentiation between two camera models. Right. If you're selling cameras, it's easier to say, well, this camera takes eight megapixel pictures, but this one takes twelve megapixel pictures, so it's four megapixels better. It's easier to make that a selling point, even though all the different factors that really determine the quality of an image are much more subtle than that,

so the same thing is true. I would argue with high resolution televisions, it's easier to say four K is a higher resolution and therefore is better than HD than it does to dig down into all the particulars, which is what we're going to do today. If you listened to UH, there's an episode of tech Stuff called What's

the Big Deal with Megapixels? We talked about this. This was back in two thousand nine, and that was Chris Palette, my former co host, and I. We sat down and talked about megapixels and why they aren't the end all be all in digital cameras. You could almost take that episode and do a search replace for megapixel to resolution and camera to television and have a very similar argument for this particular episode, but please don't do that, otherwise I'll be wasting my time for the next thirty five

minutes or so that I record this now. And it's core resolution is referring to how many points of light or pixels if we're talking displays make up the images you see on screen. So if your television was just one pixel, you would just get one solid block of light as your picture. It would be whatever the color of light was being displayed at your one at that time. But that's it. You would have like red or green or blue or whatever it might be, or just white.

That's all it would be able to show. Because it's one pixel, it's one point of light. It would just be a really big one. Pixels can come in different sizes. They can be teeny teeny tiny, or they could be larger. Very frequently, I use an analogy where I talk about imagine you've got a wooden frame and you've got some blocks that you can place within that frame to make different pictures. And each block is of a solid color.

So you've got lots of different blocks to choose from, but you have a limited number that you can use at any given time because the size of the frame and the eyes of the blocks determine how many blocks you can use. So you've got this one frame and you get sixteen blocks, and it's your job to make a car out of those sixteen blocks, or rather the frame can hold sixteen blocks. You've got enough different colors

to choose whatever you want. Well, you might be able to make something that's vaguely car shaped, and people might be able to figure out what you were creating based upon association, but it's not really gonna look like a car. It's gonna be really blocky. Well, let's say that I give you that same size frame, but now I'm giving you much much, much smaller blocks, and you have sixteen

thousand of them instead of sixteen. Well, now you could make an image of a car that looks much more car like because these pixels are smaller, You've got more of them, the resolution is better. It's still gonna be a little jagged because you're still using blocks, but it's going to look much more like an actual car. Then let's say I give you a hundred sixty thousand blocks. They are even smaller, and you can use those to

make your image of a car. Each time I'm reducing the pixel size, I'm also increasing the number of pixels that can fit within that frame. And each time the resolution increases, you get a better level of detail with each decrease in size and increase in number. So standard definition in the United States for the old four three aspect ratio TVs was it was seven hundred four by

four hundred eighty pixels. You had uh a width of a screen that was seven hundred four pixels wide, and you had a height of the screen that was four hundred eighty pixels tall. This was really the video source resolution. When you look at the actual resolution of television screens, it's a little different, but that gets so complicated. We're gonna focus on the video formats the standards. So four eighty pixels tall, and that's how we would measure resolution.

We looked at vertical resolution. How many pixels vertically do you have, So in the US it was four eighty. If you take those two numbers, the four tall by seven hundred four wide, and you multiply them together, you determine how many pixels are in that feed in the first place, and in this case you end up with a number that's three d thirty seven thousand, nine hundred

twenty pixels. So even in my example of a hundred sixty thousand little blocks to create your picture of a car, that was about half of what standard definition television was capable of showing. Of course, it's never that simple, because the world is a complicated, messy place. For one thing, the center definition would be different in Europe than in the United States because the systems that Europe used were independent of these systems we used here in the US.

So PAL and c CAMP systems spawned television sets with screens that had seven four pixels wide but five hundred seventy six pixels tall, which meant you ended up with a grand total of four hundred five thousand, five hundred

four pixels, so slightly different between Europe and the US. Now, I could also talk a little bit about horizontal scaling, but that just will delay us from getting to uh D even longer, and honestly, it's not really that important, so we'll move on to talk about high definition or

h d TV. These sets were able to display more pixels on a screen than standard definition screens, and we're gonna stick to television's here because we could go down the rabbit hole of displays in general, like computer monitors and that sort of thing, but that's beyond the scope of this episode. We're really talking about four K t

V s when you get down to it. So you've got three major types of high definition resolutions seven twenty ten A d P, and ten A d I. Now the two ten eight s have the same resolution but display those lines of pixels in different ways. So P stands for progressive scan meaning that it's showing all the pixels in every every run of a refresh. The I

stands for an relays scanning. You're showing every other line with every refresh, but you're doing those refreshes frequently enough where the human I can't pick up ideally the fact that you're only getting half of the lines of pixels on any given instant. Uh So, again where it goes outside the scope of four K television's just know that you're seeing a lot more pixels than you would with

standard definition. With seven twenty, we're looking at a video format of one thousand, two hundred and eighty columns of pixels versus seven twenty rows of pixels. So again we're looking at the height that vertical element vertical resolution seven twenty pixels tall, but you've got seven and twenty times one two hundred eighty that gives you more than nine hundred thousand pixels. In actuality, it turns out to be eight seventy six thousand. That's because of the way that

television is actually display this information. So again it's a little bit less than what you would get if you just multiply those two numbers together, but in the same ballpark. Then you have ten e D resolution, which is one thousand eighty pixels tall. Again vertical resolution, but it has

one thousand nine pixels wide. So you multiply those two numbers together, you get two million, seventy three thousand, six hundred pixels, though the real number is two million, five thousand fifty six for ten a d P and one million fived five thousand two d I because again it

does that interlacing. So uh. The important thing to remember again, way more pixels than you would get with standard definition, but you really only enjoy the benefit if you are getting high definition content, and this is the same that is true for ultra high definition content, like you have to have the content to go on the set to actually be able to enjoy this boost in pixels. If the information is not there, then all you can do is perhaps up gale the image, which mostly involves a

lot of guesswork. It doesn't magically convert standard definition to high definition video. If you get the upscaling, that typically involves an algorithm that's making a best guess what a non existent pixel in a video source would be based

on its neighbors. So you get an incoming video source that standard definition that's set for a certain number of pixels, you're going to put it on a television that has effectively twice as many pixels, maybe more, And in order to fill in all that information that doesn't exist, the algorithm would essentially say, well, all the neighboring pixels for this one that doesn't exist, but should they're all read.

So I'm gonna make this one red too, because my guess is based upon the information I have it should be read. It does this over and over and over again for the entire picture. So these algorithms are pretty good, but they're not perfect. Also, they don't they don't talk. I I said talking to make a point, but they

don't actually speak because they're algorithms. Now, I think it's safe to say that most people think of ten A D as the basic high definition set these days rather than the seven twenty unless they're looking at smaller TVs. One of the things that's really important with high definition and also ultra high definition is the screen size. At ten a D t V with a forty screen has just as many pixels as a ten A D t

V with a seventy screen. So if you've got two televisions and one is and is much larger than the other, but they're both at the same resolution, they both have the same number of pixels, the smaller set crams those pixels together much more closely. They're smaller than the larger set is. Now, usually the difference in size isn't so great that you can actually pick up on the difference, like being able to actually see the pixels unless you're

right up there on the screen. So it's not like you necessarily notice it if you're watching the television from a good viewing distance. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later on too. If you get really close to a screen, or you start looking at seriously huge screens at lower resolutions, then you're gonna start noticing pixels. So let's talk about ultra high definition television specifically. Now this includes four K, but we'll also talk about eight

K sets. That's uh the concept televisions that, if they ever do come to market, are going to be further into the future. I mean, you could pour out a ridiculous amount of cash and get an eight K television set, but it would make no sense because there's nothing to watch on it, not at eight K resolution, not unless you're also paying people to make eight K content for you to watch on your eight K TV. And if that's the case, I'm I'm amazed, and I want you

to adopt me because it sounds like you're loaded. But when we talk about ultra high definition, most people are actually talking about four K. UH. There are a lot of different terms uh D, ultra definition four K TV that all have been used interchangeably, and it's confused the market a little bit. In fact, four K alone is a confusing term. But some of you might say, well, whatever happened to two K? Like, why did we go from ten A D to four K? What happened to

two K? I heard about two K video cameras. Why don't we have two K television sets? Well, you do have two K projectors. Those do exist. So if you want to get a projector and use a projection instead of a classic television, you can get a two K projector. But there are also two K t V s. Technically, you can make an argument that ten A D h D television sets are actually two K t v s. And all of this has to do with the way we changed our perspective on television resolution by nine D degrees.

So what do I mean by that? Well, remember a ten A D h D television has a resolution of one thousand, nine twenty picks wide by one thousand eighty pixels tall. So we always talked about vertical resolution, but we don't do that with Ultra high Definition. We we did it with standard definition. Standard definition we defined by vertical resolution. High Definition we defined by vertical resolution. So we should do the same with Ultra high Definition TV, right,

you would think, but that's not the case. Instead, we turn our perspective ninety degrees. Now we talk about resolution by horizontal resolution, not vertical, so we're looking at how many pixels are there from left to right, not from top to bottom. Why. I don't know. Someone made that decision, and it's frustrating because it is inconsistent with the way

we've described televisions in the past. However, using this new way of looking at resolution, where we're looking at horizontal rather than vertical, we can look at ten eighty TVs as being two K because the resolution for a ten A D set is one thousand n twenty pixels wide by one thousand eighty pixels tall. Well, if we look at that nineteen twenty wide and we round up, you get two K. And rounding up is perfectly legit because that's what companies are already doing with four K and

eight K sets. They don't actually have four thousand pixels wide horizontal resolution or eight thousand pixels wide horizontal resolution. Instead, it's less than that, but they round up. So if they can round up, then we can round up. So now you're ten a D set. Congratulations, it just got upgraded to a two K television. Nothing about it changed technologically. We just change the way we measure resolution by looking

horizontally instead of vertically. And if it sounds like I'm a little snarky about this, it's probably because as someone who tries to communicate things about technology and science, it is really frustrating when people change up the way you measure stuff. So four K resolution, let's talk about that. A four K set or u h D set has a screen resolution of three thousand, eight hundred forty pixels

by two thousand, one hundred sixty. So again, neither of those numbers are four thousand, But now we're looking at that three thousand, eight hundred forty pixel wide that horizontal resolution number, and we're we're rounding up to four K. Also, real TVs don't have that exact resolution, but again that's the case across the board. That's the standard. However, that has been set. It is not the standard for four

K that was originally set by Digital Cinema Initiatives. Uh. They set a four thousand pixel wide standard ages ago, but no one actually makes TVs that follow that standard. That standard, by the way, was specifically four thousand, ninety six pixels. It wasn't four thousand, even Scoff. Scoff said the TV manufacturers, and that's why we get the three thousand, hundred forty by two thousand, one hundred and sixty nonsense.

But here's the good news. The difference in resolution between what four K actually is and what it was supposed to be based upon Digital Cinema Initiatives proposal is about and at that percentage it is imperceptible to the human eye. So if you were to switch that three thousand, eight hundred forty pixels wide to four thousand ninety pixels wide, no one would notice. It's too small a change for it to be uh perceptible. So or perceivable, or any

of those words you wouldn't notice, is my point. This did mark where we started looking at horizontal resolution instead of vertical though, so that has changed the industry. Uh If you multiply those numbers together, by the way, and you're wondering how many pixels would be in a four K image, you're talking about eight million, two four hundred pixels, so you do get around four times the number of pixels on your screen as you would with ten eight sets.

So that probably also adds more confusion. With the four K. People might think, oh, four K doesn't really mean four thousand, it means four times the resolution of ten eight. That's not exactly true either. Besides which you wouldn't call it four K, you'd call it four x and if that were the case, But it does have the benefit of making people more confused. So yeah, now, just like HD, you would have to get u h D content onto your television set in order to really enjoy that higher resolution.

Otherwise you're really looking at more examples of upscaling, where you're taking in a lower resolution image and adding more information into it in order to display it in a uh D format. Meanwhile, you probably heard of eight K sets, which don't get me started on those is they're really in the concept TV stage at the moment, so you're not gonna have a whole lot of opportunities to buy

one unless you have a ridiculous amount of money. We're talking like a hundred thousand dollars for a television set that has nothing to show on it. Um. Also, uh, you would probably just end up watching four K content or or less on it, so you wouldn't really be able to enjoy the full benefit of it. You could have an enormous TV at that size and sit really close to it and not notice any pixels. That's one benefit, but uh, without having stuff to watch on it, you

probably wouldn't really appreciate it very much. However, the technical specs for right K involve a resolution of seven thousand, six hundred eighty by four thousand, three D twenty pixels. This ups the pixel count tool whopping thirty three million, one seventy seven thousand, six hundred pixels yeasa, But again, you'd have to have that a K video source to really enjoy that. So let's say you've heard all this, but you're thinking about getting a four K television set

where do you get your content? And how big of a television should you get? And how close should you sit to the screen. We're gonna answer those questions in our next section, but first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, So let's say you're in the market to buy a new television, and chances are in your area four KSE sets are dominating your search because they're the flagship products for many manufacturers out there.

Their prices have been coming down in recent years, so they're no longer in the realm of just like the wealthy or the bleeding edge adopters. They're no longer like two thousand or four thousand dollar sets, although you can certainly find some there in that price point. You can find some now that are less than a thousand dollars. You can still find h D sets in a few places, although that are becoming more challenging to find there being

phased out slowly by the market. You can make a whole lot more money selling four K sets than you can with HD sets. HD sets, the prices have come down enough so that the profit margins are pretty narrow. Four K sets that hasn't totally hit the bottom of where where those prices are going yet, So there's an incentive on the part of retailers to carry four K sets to make more money and to up sell you, to convince you that the four K experience is better

than the HD experience. Uh So, if you want to look at four K, it's brand new relatively speaking, the companies have an incentive to sell it to you. What do you watch on it? Let's say that you want one, you decided to buy one. What do you actually watch on your four K set? What's available? Well, it's not gonna be cable television because cable TV doesn't carry any four K content. That means you're out of luck if you're hoping to pull down ultra high definition versions of

your favorite shows on cable. Now satellites a little bit different. Direct TV and Dish Network have both done a little bit of broadcasting in four K, but it's only been a little bit. Like it's it's again not widely available across all their programming. So that means to really take advantage of four K you need to do a couple of other things. One thing you could do is get a four K Blu Ray player and some four K

Blu Ray titles to play on it. If you get a four K Blu Ray player and play a normal Blu Ray on it, you won't enjoy the four K resolution. You have to get the actual discs that were encoded in four K. Some devices like the Xbox one X can play four K Blu Ray discs and tend to be, you know, of a comparable price than two two four

K Blue ray sets. Four K Blue ray set that's dedicated might be a couple hundred dollars cheaper than say an Xbox one X, So it becomes one of those things you weigh, do you save a couple of hundred dollars by getting the dedica Blu Ray four K player, or do you shell out a little more money and get an Xbox one X that's also a video game console and a media center on top of being a

Blu Ray player. Uh. But you also have to keep in mind there's a limited amount of four K titles that are on optical discs in the first place, so not everything is available in four K resolution. Uh. They do have an advantage when it comes to four K optical versus four K streaming optical discs. You're gonna run into fewer artifacts. Artifacts are essentially the visual element that is similar to noise in audio recordings. You get these things that can be very distracting. You can notice some

jagged edges or other issues from compression algorithms. That's because streaming video you have to compress it in order to have reasonable transfer times. You're sending so much data across networks. If you want to make sure that the person receiving it is getting a decent experience, you have to compress it. Well. The more you compress it, the more chances there are inserting artifacts into the signal. You don't run into that

as much. On optical disk encoding. It can happen, especially with like a manufacturing error, but you were less likely to run into it. So if you go out and you start buying discs again, you'll be able to watch in glorious four K resolution. You can get four K feeds from several popular streaming services, though, as I just mentioned, they use compression algorithms, so you might run into the occasional artifact, and you do need a decent Internet connection

to really take advantage of them. But they include Amazon Video, Netflix, Voodoo YouTube, PlayStation Video Ultra Flicks, and the few others that all offer four K content. In some of these cases, in order to get access to the four K content, you have to pay a premium to the service, so you would have to step up a tier. In Netflix, for example, you have to pay a little bit more per month in order to have access to the four K titles. And again it doesn't cover all the titles

that Netflix has, but only some of them. And typically if you wanted to buy a four K title or rent a four K title on a streaming service, they tend to be a little more expensive than high definition versions, which in turn tend to be a little more expensive than standard definition versions. Essentially, the more data that has to be pushed to you, the higher the cost is

going to be to you. And if you don't have that decent internet connection, then it's going to be a miserable experience and you probably don't want to be streaming four K content in the first place. If you're a gamer, many video games for the PS four Pro and the Xbox one X are going to include four K content, although the PS four Pro is really more of a slight upscale than Xbox one X is Xbox one X can do true for hey, so you'll be able to gain in four a K. That is going to continue

to change over time. You're going to see more and more titles adopt four K technology, as well as more shows and movies and other experiences will be upgraded to four K as time goes on. The same thing was true for HD back in the day. I remember when the only HD channel you could get showed things like sunrises and sunsets, and nature scenes and underwater scenes, stuff that had a lot of vibrant colors and a lot of detail. Those were the things that were featured on

this channel that would run for twenty four hours. It would just do these things on a loop. It was really impressive to look at, but there was no real narrative there, and after a while you just kind of give up on the plot ever moving forward, but obviously over time we've seen HD content blossom both literally and figuratively, so that we have a lot more to choose from. The same thing will will be true with ultra high definition,

but we're not quite there yet. We're still seeing that develop over time, so you might not have a whole lot to watch or play on your four case set once you get it initially. But that's only one thing that you have to consider. How far away are you going to sit from your television. That's an important question for a couple of reasons. Every television has a range of distances at which it is best to view content, and it also depends on the type of content that

you're watching. If you get closer to the television than that ideal range, you'll find that the set takes up so much of your field of view that it can create an unpleasant experience. If you sit too far back, well, you would have the same effect as watching a smaller screen closer up. So if you buy a seventy in television but you're sitting twenty five feet back, you might as well have had a smaller TV and set closer

to it. You'll get the same effect. And honestly, it might even be difficult or even impossible for you to tell the difference between an HD set and a u h D television set, each running their respective video sources, unless you get really close to them, and then you might be able to notice the change the difference in pixel sizes, but at the optimal viewing distance, they might

be indistinguishable from each other. Now, generally speaking, higher resolutions become more noticeable when you are closer to larger screens. The smaller the screen, the further back you are, the less noticeable the difference between different resolutions. There's a site called r T I n g S is essentially Ratings but without the a that does television reviews. They also have some really great articles up about viewing distances, particularly

for different types of televisions. They've done a lot of work to look at various TV viewing distance options and suss out which ones are the best ones for different types of experiences. So I'm gonna rely on their system very heavily. But if you want to check out their site, which I have no connection to, I don't know anyone. Oh we're there and they don't know I'm talking about them. So this is honestly Jonathan's resource that he goes to

for his own use. Uh. It is www dot r T I n g S dot com, and I think it's a pretty handy resource. So happy to throw those guys from traffic because they do good work. Now, one thing our teams concentrates on is the field of you. Something that's important to create a positive viewing experience. So,

for example, sports can be a little disconcerting. They can even induce nausea if you if it's taking too much of your field of view while you're trying to look at one specific point uh in the the the image. So let's say that it's a football game and you're concentrating on the quarterback, but a lot of this stuff is going on around it, around you, and some super high resolution and it's taking up a lot of your

field of view. That can actually make you start feeling motion sickness, So you don't want to have it take up so much of your field of view. That's giving you a negative uh experience. And it's also partly because sports tend to be really fast paced, so you end up having to look around a lot, maybe even move your head, depending on how close you are to the television.

If it's taking up so much of your frame of view that you actually have to turn your head in order to follow what's happening, you're probably too close to the TV. It feels like you're sitting in that front row in a movie theater. That's really too close to be a good viewing experience. You sit there, and you think the only reason these seats exist is so the theater can sell them. It doesn't have any benefit to

the viewer. You don't want to be in that first row or maybe the first two rows, depending on the movie theater you're in. UH. But let's say you know, you want to figure out what is the ideal viewing area for your particular television and you want to take all these factors into consideration television screen size as well as its resolution. What do you do? Luckily, you can learn all about this over at that side I was talking about. According to the site, the average human viewing

angle takes up about a hundred thirty five degrees. So that's what you start with. You have a hundred thirty five degrees viewing angle just from human vision. Our teams suggest that if you want your television UH to display cinematic content, like you're gonna watch a lot of movies on your TV, maybe look at around of that field of view being taken up by your television. If you want mixed usage, so you've gotta use your TV to watch TV shows and sports and all sorts of different content,

maybe video games as well. You want to go closer to thirty degrees. You want to decrease the amount of space it's taking up in your field of view. Uh, because bigger is not always better, It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have a more pleasant viewing experience. So the size of your TV is going to help determine what you need to do, like how far back you

need to sit from it. If the size of your TV and the distance you sit from it means it takes up fifty degrees of your field of view, it's going to start feeling like you're sitting in that super close theater seat. That's totally unpleasant. So let's say you live in a modest apartment and you have limitations on

your space. You just don't have a whole lot of space to work with your chair or couch or bean bag or I don't know, your faithful servant on all fours his positions, so that you sit six ft away from the television that you're watching. So if you're sitting six ft away at that distance according to the R Team's site, you have a size distance calculator, you'd be best served with a television that's got a forty three inch screen, So six ft away screens perfect ohen Remember

these screen sizes are measured on the diagonal. They're not across, it's it's from one corner to the other corner, uh, diagonally across the screen. Now, could you buy a bigger screen for your place? Yeah, but it might not actually

give you a better viewing experience. So let's say that you've been doing really well for yourself, and now you've got a nice large home theater room and you've got your diamonds studded lazy boys at up about ten point nine ft or three point three one meters from your television, and you plan on watching the Stanley Cup finals. So how big a television will you need? Well, at that distance, you need a screen that's eighty inches to take up thirty degrees of your field of view. So you're looking

at an eighty inch television screen. Huge, right, But will you actually notice the uptick and resolution if you're using a four KSE set and getting a four K feed of the hockey game versus an HD set with an HD feed of the hockey game. Our things did this work too. If the screen is small and we're sitting far away, we cannot perceive a distance or difference rather

in resolutions. You won't be able to tell the difference between standard definition, High def aisition and ultra high definition because you're looking at a screen that's too far away and too small for those details to be perceivable. It does take this idea to the extreme, however, because if you're looking at s D versus HD versus uh D, you have to be really far away before those differences no longer register with you. So let's say you've got

a forty inch screen, it's a decent sized television. How far away must the TV B so that you cannot tell the difference between standard definition and high definition video sources? You'd have to have a fourteen feet away or four point three meters. That's pretty far. Most people I know don't set up a television fourteen feet away from where

they're going to view it. So this tells us that the jump between standard definition and high definition is big enough in quality to be perceptible at normal viewing distances with your typical televisions. So if you're not gonna sit closer than fourteen feet, then it doesn't matter. But chance is are you are, so high definition would make sense. But what about seven twenty high definition versus ten eighty

high definition. How close would you need to be to this forty inch television to be able to tell the difference between those two Well, you'd have to be about eight feet away or two point four meters, so almost half the distance as the previous jump, So the seven twenty entry level high definition. Once you hit eight feet away,

you would notice the difference between seven twenty and ten eight. Still, you might very well have your chair set up within eight feet, like you might be closer than eight feet when you have a forty inch television set. In fact, the ideal viewing distance for a forty inch television screen is five point six feet, So if you followed that guideline, you definitely be able to tell the difference between the seven twenty and a ten eight resolution screen. But what

about ultra high definition? So now we're looking at ten eighty versus four K. The ideal viewing distance to see the difference in resolution for a forty in ultra high definition television is two point three ft or point seven one less than a meter away. That's that's for you to get to a point where you start noticing the resolution limitations. So chances are. You're not gonna be sitting

that close to your television. You're probably not saying within two point three ft of your TV, which means that there's not any real difference between the HD quality and the uh D quality as you perceive it because the limitations of the human eye. This has nothing to do with the technology. The differences are there, we just can't see them because our eyes don't pick up detail at

that level. So while the technology makes it possible, we can't really enjoy it unless we're sitting uncomfortably close to our televisions. Now, obviously that's forty in television. That's not in the realm of the big, big screen TVs. It's a decent sized tele vision, but you know they get much larger than that. What if we were looking at a seventy inch television, If you had a seventy in uh D television, you'd have to sit closer than four point four feet or one point three five meters before

you hit its resolution limitation. So my point is is that in most viewing cases, you're not likely to see a big jump in picture quality on resolution alone unless you're sitting right up on your screen. But one thing you will get with a four K or U h D t V is the freedom to sit at whatever distance you prefer from your television without it affecting your perception of the resolution. So you open up a lot

more options with your home theater system. If you're going four O K, you don't have to worry about, oh, well, this seat is a little too close because I can actually see the the pixels here. You're not gonna have that happen with four K unless you set the chair where you can reach out and touch the screen of the TV, which I do not recommend you do, particularly with a seven inch television. Um So, it doesn't necessarily mean that the experience is going to be measurably better.

You might notice it occasionally, depending upon the feed, but it's not as big a jump from h D to U h D as it was from s D to h D as far as our perception is concerned. Anyway, technologically it was a huge jump. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean this picture is going to leap out at you with lifelike quality. If you've seen four K demonstrations and stores and you've noticed a huge difference between four K and ten eight, and you thought well, Jonathan, you're crazy.

I've been to a television store and I've seen the four K sets and the quality is amazing. And then I looked at the h D sets that are running the same video, of the qualities nowhere near as good. It is demonstrably better with four K. This could be an example of a store gaming the system. I'm not saying all stores do this. I'm saying lots the stores do this. So there's more money to be made selling four K TVs than h D t v s. There's

an incentive to move those four K televisions. To do that, you need to show that the four K sets are much better than the ten e D sets, at least until the standard is shifted enough so that the ten sets are pretty much no longer an option in the first place, so you only have four k's to choose from. One way you could do this is by stacking the deck, by making sure the video feeds going to four K sets are true four K video. So you've got true

uncompressed four K video going to these TVs. That's gonna give you the best quality video at least as far as resolution is concerned on those sets. Meanwhile, you might use highly compressed high definition video sent to the high definition sets. So while it is technically HD content, it has been compressed and therefore has introduced artifacts and some

other elements that make it less ideal. So you can notice the difference between four K and HD, but in part because it's been manufactured, it's that it's not playing on a level field. The one set is getting the absolute best equipment and the other sets getting the worst or at least substandard. So that's a possibility. I'm not saying every store doesn't. I'm saying a lot of stores

do do it, though, so you might run into that. Also, when you're looking at televisions in a store, chances are you're going to be standing a lot closer to the TV than you typically would at home when you're viewing it in your home theater space. As you are closer, you will notice differences in that quality. The higher resolution when you're closer is going to hold up better than

a lower resolution. But again, once you get into the viewing conditions of your home, you may be far enough back where that difference doesn't play up so much you can't really notice it. So keep that in mind as well, and I think this is a good place for me to relate a personal anecdote. I remember going to C E S a few years ago when four KSE sets were still in the concept phase, kind of the way eight case sets are now. I remember walking up to

a company. I won't name the company, but they weren't the only one. Several companies were doing this where they had two different television sets side by side, running the same loop of video next to each other, and one of them was a four case set and the other was a high definition set. And I remember walking up and as I walked up, looking at the two and thinking,

I can't tell the difference. If they did not have the signs there, or if someone put one sign over, like if they swapped the two signs with each other, I still wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have said, Wow, this HD actually looks better than that ultra high definition. To me, they looked almost identical. It wasn't until I got very close that I started to notice the differences. But then I was beyond where I would normally be

watching the television. I would have been further back had this actually been in my living room, so it was largely lost on me, and at first I thought maybe it was just my limitations of my vision, but a lot of other people felt the same way. Now I think there might have even been a bit of a bias for some folks, because if you tell them this one's got a higher resolution than that one, they might believe they perceived that higher resolution, even if it's not

within human levels of perception. You've got this in biases all the time, and in various experiments and studies. You have to be extra careful to build in for that so that way you don't uh you don't skew the results.

So if you have the option, you should do a double blind test, which means neither the people running the test nor the people taking the test know which display is HD versus which one is u h D, And if you could still tell the difference at normal viewing distances between the two, that tells you that uh D has a demonstrably better resolution if it's perceptible, But otherwise you would just say, well, you really can't tell the difference. The same thing, by the way, is true of the

eight case sets I've seen. Actually, I would argue it's more true even though you've got way more pixels with an eight KSE set than you do with a four case set. Those changes in details are so subtle to the human eye as to be impossible to tell the difference.

So while I think you could probably tell the difference between HD and four K if you're close enough, you have to be real, real close to an eight case set before you can tell the difference between an eight K and a four K. I just don't think that leap in pixels, as impressive as it is, has any

real benefit. I do remember seeing a demonstration of an enormous one eight K television set in which I was invited to take a magnifying glass and walk right up to the screen so that I could finally see the individual pixels with the help of magnification, which was an impressive display pun intended, but it was not really practical for any everyday use. I mean, first of all, it's

a hundred inch television. I definitely don't have a space where a hundred inch television would fit and make any sense. Some people do, I guess, but I can't imagine a situation where that eight K would actually result in a noticeable difference in quality, at least not unless you had your nose pressed up against the screen. So the question is am I completely opposed to four K and higher resolutions. We'll find out in a second, but first let's take

a break to thank our sponsor. All right, bottom line, do I think four KTVs are worth it? If I were shopping or television right now, I would probably look at four K sets since they're starting to come down in price and it will help me future proof my TV. So as much as it sounds like I've been bad mouthing four K, I'm really just trying to build the case to explain why that higher resolution is not necessarily

the selling point you should look at. You should not look at that number and think this number is bigger than my old TVs number. Therefore this television set is better than my old TV. It is more complicated than that. But I would look at four k's if I were buying a television right now. When they first debuted, they were costing thousands of dollars. I am not in that tax bracket. I am not going to be able to spend five grand on a TV. That's just not who

I am. It's not I don't make that kind of money. If someone wants to make me an offer, let me hear it. Otherwise, I'm going to buy televisions that are more in my price range and only when I really need to upgrade. I don't think that four K on its own is enough to push you to upgrade to a new television if you're old television is working well, If your old TV is still displaying a good picture, and you're satisfied with the way it performs and it works with all of your other equipment, I do not

see a reason to upgrade right away. If you are looking to upgrade, four K is probably the way you should go rather than trying to find h D. The differences in price have have come down to a point where it just makes more sense to look at four K than to keep looking for HD. So just don't expect it to be an enormous leap in picture quality from resolution alone anyway over an HD. Uh, It's not as big a leap from HD to four K as

you noticed from s D to HD. So instead of fixating on resolution, I would actually look at other factors to help guide me to purchase the right television set for me, for example, is just smart TV. This might surprise you, because if the answer is yes, it's a smart TV that actually makes me pause when it comes to buying the television set. I want to know what those smart features are, and I want to know how

they are implemented in the television set. Is the television potentially going to compromise the security of my home network if it's an attack vector for a hacker, I don't want it Not. Everyone incorporates smart technology in a smart way, meaning a way that prevents outside attackers from getting some sort of access to your network. Now, a hacker might not be able to access everything on my home network

through my television. It may be that that's just not possible, but they might be able to turn my TV into a bot for a bot net and send traffic to some other poor, unsuspecting web server out there. I don't want that to happen. So I need to know that the smart TV technology has been implemented in a way

that is safe, which means doing research. I don't, off the top of my head know how all the different implementations are, so I couldn't just rattle off which brands are are good and which brands might be less good at security for your home network system. But beyond that, I also want to know what features are in there. Are there any voice activation features? If so, how does that voice activation work? And is it constantly monitoring me?

Is it something that could potentially record conversations? Again, whether a hacker attacks it or someone on the back end of things flips the switch. I don't want that. I want to maintain my privacy. So in those cases, I would say, let's not get that smart TV because it ultimately could compromise my own privacy and security. So I

don't jump immediately on the smart TV bandwagon. Even though I love technology, I love getting the new toys with all the new bells and whistles, I don't want to jump on that wagon at the expense of my own safety. So I I would probably be a little cautious about buying a smart TV, unless, of course, I researched it and saw that either the application was really really safe or that the features that were involved are such that it's not likely to be a privacy risk in the

first place. However, I've got a lot of other equipment that already allows me to access lots of streaming services, web browsing, that kind of thing that are already connected to my entertainment system, so I don't really need my television to do it too. But it would just be a redundant system on top of the other ones I already have, unless its implementation is so much better than the experience I get on my various consoles and other equipment that it just makes sense to switch, because that

could happen. If a TV interface is somehow better than whatever other equipment I'm using, then I would switch, but again it would have to meet that level of privacy and security that I require before I adopt that technology. Then there's refresh rate. This tells you how frequently the television creates the image, How quickly does it paint with pixels? How many times per second does it refresh the image

that you are looking at. Old standard definition televisions in the US had a refresh rate of sixty hurts, which was sixty frames per second. The really we're talking interlaced, so really it was thirty lines of pixels refreshed every second and thirty other lines of pixels refreshed every second, with the two alternating each second, so or multiple times each second, so all the odd lines would be displayed.

Then all the even lines would be displayed, then all the odd lines displayed again, then all the even lines displayed again, and both both sets would refresh thirty times a second with the full array of pixels. Uh being you know, that's where you get your sixty. You can take the thirty times too, That's where you get your sixty hurts. But nowadays you can find refresh rates at a hundred twenty hurts or two hurts, or even higher

than that. Now does that bigger number mean better? In my opinion, no, It's very similar to resolution, except in this case I would argue that the bigger numbers are actually creating a less enjoyable viewing experience, at least for me. This again is personal preference. The higher refresh rates create a smoothing effect, so you reduce motion blur, you get smoother transitions, you can follow fast moving action much more clearly.

It's very good for stuff like sports. Let's say you've got a really fast sport event that's on display on your television. With a high refresh rate, you can really follow the action easily. But to me, that same quality makes certain television shows and movies almost unwatchable. It creates what people have referred to as the soap opera effect, this feeling that you're watching a digital video soap opera.

That feels a bit uncanny, right, It doesn't feel like you're watching film or movies, or or television or anything like that. And I personally don't like that effect. So I would not be looking at any sort of television that has a refresh rate of two forty hurts. Hurts would be the top level that I would look at. The tricks used to create those refresh rates can smooth things out so much that again, it just becomes this negative experience. And I always talk about the Hobbit forty

eight frames per second version that I saw. I hated that effect. I had a very negative reaction to it. I know there are filmmakers who love it. I despised it. There's also other things to consider. The way the television is back lit is important. So you've got to have light coming from behind the television screen in order for you to see the displays that your television shows. Right like, you won't see any picture if there's no light coming from the TV. But some televisions use light that is

called edge lighting. Edge lighting creates columns of light across your television, So that means that the color and light representation is going to be more accurate within those columns than it will be at the edges of those columns, and it's not as good as a fully backlit television that has what is called full array local dimming. If you have full array local dimming with a backlit television,

it's just gonna be a more convincing image. In general, the colors are going to be more accurate, and the lighting will be more accurate as well, and it can provide lots more gradiations in light intensity, so you can have more subtle differences between various say darkly lit scenes. Uh. I always think about the Batman films when I talk

about this level of of quality for television. If you think about Batman movies, particularly the ones that were made, you know, in the nineties and up to present day, they often have action sequences that take place in the dark. Batman often is lurking in the shadows. But if you don't have a really good display that's able to show these gradations in and uh similarly colored items on screen, like things that are dark gray versus black, everything gets lost.

You can't make out any detail, so you need to have that subtle change in lighting to be able to make out what's what's actually happening. Otherwise you might as well just be watching a black screen and play the movie soundtrack on on the stereo. Then there's contrast ratio, which is related to this. You want a really good contrast ratio, but there's a problem. There's no standard of

measurement for contrast ratio. Contrast ratio is something that a lot of manufacturers talk about, but there's no simple metric to point at where you can you can judge one television versus another just using that metric. It doesn't exist. What you want is the ability for your television set to display true black colors as as close to true black as possible, and true white colors as as close to bright white as possible, with as many different gradations

between those two extremes as you possibly can get. The more gradations you get, the more accurate you can represent different colors in different levels of light. So keep in mind that if you go to a store to check out these televisions, because really the only way you can get an idea of a television's contrast ratio is to see one of the TVs showing something. You need to watch the TV so you can see what the contrast ratio looks like like. Do the dark portions of the

screen actually look dark? Do they look charcoal gray because there's a lot of light bleeding through. You need to actually be there in person and view it. The problem is if you go to a store and you go and watch these TVs, they may not be calibrated properly, which means you might not be seeing the television at its best example right. It might be miscalibrated. So it may require multiple trips to multiple stores to get an idea of which sets are have the best contrast ratio.

Or you can rely on review sites that have people who calibrate these sets and do measurements and they try their best to say which ones have the best contrast ratio. That's your other option. I do highly recommend doing that research because contrast ratio does make a big difference, especially if you like to watch movies in a dark room, It's gonna make a huge difference. This is getting a little calm implicated, but that's the way good televisions are.

And now there's high dynamic range or HDR. This isn't about resolution, but this is about color replication. It can also contribute to better contrast ratios if you have HDR. Now, HDR is a technology, it's a set of standards, which actually it's a competing sets of standards as it turns out, but it's starting to shake out now. But like four K resolutions, in order to enjoy the the technology of HDR, you're gonna have to have content that was shot or

processed in HDR. In other words, if you just play any old video on an HDR television set, it's not like the colors are going to suddenly turn magical and feel like you're right there. You have to have HDR content to take advantage of this technology, just like you don't have to have a four K video to take

advantage of four K resolution. Now, if that is the case, if you do have HDR content and you have an HDR set, you're going to enjoy a much more subtle palette of colors than one that does not have HDR. Images are going to appear more vibrant, they're going to the brightest colors are going to have very subtle changes in them. So it looks very realistic, to the point where if you have a really good high resolution television with HDR, they might look like you're looking at a

window into another scene. So if it were a garden, it might look like you're looking at actual physical plants, and the television is really just a portal that leads you in there. So it gives you an amazing sense of depth. It's not three D the way we traditionally think about like we think of three D is stuff coming toward us from the screen, But this is three D in the sense of depth, Like it feels like you could step into the screen and go further into

the scene itself. That's how effective HDR is when it is properly implement it. There's always a qualifier because you can do bad HDR and it won't make it won't make it look magical, it'll just look bad. So UH is pretty powerful stuff, though, so I highly recommend that if you're going television shopping you look at HDR. So if I'm buying a television today, i'd look for something around the fifty inch range because that's about what I have now. Maybe go up to sixty inch because I'm

tempted to. I know that sixty inch is probably too large a television for my living room, but I kind of want to make that mistake anyway. My wife, however, being the voice of reason, keeps me grounded, sometimes literally grounds me. But that's a concept for a totally different type of show. So I'd probably stick somewhere in the

fifty range. I'd want HDR because even though it's early days of HDR and there's still not a huge amount of content out there, the difference is really noticeable, more so than four K resident Suan, So I would definitely want HDR to be part of the television. It probably would be a four case set. I don't think I would find an HDR HD set out there, or I

don't know that I would necessarily want one. Might as well go to four K if I'm gonna go with HDR, and it probably would not be a smart television and it would have a true refresh rate of twenty hurts at most. Otherwise I would not be interested. Now if some company out there is saying, Jonathan, you're totally off base. You have miss misrepresented these technologies are televisions are amazing.

You will definitely tell the difference between this ultra high definition resolution and whatever you're currently using, we can guarantee it. Here's how we can prove me wrong. Just send me the television and I'll be happy to give it a full test drive and report on it and let you know what I thought, because Dad, he needs a new TV. This never works. By the way, years ago, I mentioned on an episode of Tech Stuff that I really wanting

to go on a helicopter ride. And there are a couple of helicopter pilots who are out there who are tech Stuff fans, including one who works around Atlanta, and I have not been in a helicopter yet, so I anticipate I will not magically be the recipient of a four K hd R TV anytime in the near future. But a guy could dream, right, And it was my birthday just the other day, all right. More seriously, guys, that wraps up this discussion. Is four K resolution really

worth it? It's debatable. I side on the probably not for most cases. But at the same time, if I were buying a television today, I would get a four case set because that there are other options that are frequently bundled with four K that make a very real difference, and who knows, it may be one of those times where I would notice a little bit of a difference,

and sometimes a little bit is enough. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, or you just have something you want to tell me, send me a message. My email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can always drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff h s W. Remember you can watch me record this show live on twitch dot tv slash tech stuff every Wednesday and Friday. Just visit that U r L to see the show's schedule. You'll

get to see me. The people who watched this stream also got to see the guys from Stuff. They don't want you to know. They stopped in and chatted for a while. Uh. That did not make the final podcast, but it did make the live stream, so you can always join in and see. You never know who's gonna show up or what sort of mistakes will happen. All sorts of shenanigans happened today. I hope to see you there and I'll talk to you again really soon for

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