Beyond HDTV 354
The Hub writes "The Economist writes a thoughtful article about the next generation of HDTVs and how they will provide resolutions beyond 1080p. The drive for higher resolution is driven in part by the demands of 3D content. Also, some see streaming higher resolution content to the home as a way to make up for declining DVD sales. This would mean the studios would have to better embrace services such as Netflix or stream directly to the consumer. Mind you, picture quality is driven by more than the number of pixels."
Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right (Score:5, Insightful)
I would venture to guess that 80%-90% of the people buying HDTV's are doing it either because their old TV broke and it's the only thing available, or because they heard it was cool from a friend and wanted it for their Superbowl party. Either way, almost no one really understands it or even knows how to get the most out of all that resolution as it is NOW. We're talking people who buy 32" HDTV's and sit 10 feet away from them, thinking they're getting "high definition." We're talking people who hook up DVD (and even blu-ray) players to their HDTV's with composite cables. We're talking people who still have the same SD cable box they've had for years, thinking that the channels "really look better now in HD."
Joe isn't even ready for 1080p. This whole "let's add even MORE resolution" thing is just industry hype. It's Sony and Samsung thinking that if they just keep adding new gimmicks that people will constantly trade up their TV's like they trade up their computers. Joe Sixpack already has a perfectly good HDTV that he isn't even using to its full potential as it is, but they want him to go out and buy a TV with a resolution that he would need a magnifying glass to even appreciate. Welcome to America!
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole 1080p thing has obliterated decent computer monitor resolutions. I don't give a rat's buttock about TVs and BluRays and home theater setups and all that crap, but the faster the mainstream media tech goes beyond 1080p, the faster I can have cheap high resolution computer monitors again.
1080 is low resolution garbage when it comes to desktop displays.
Oh please no (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer monitors have been following television resolutions & aspect ratios. We need height back in our displays for all the portrait document-oriented stuff that we spend the majority of our times with on computers (emails, webpages, word processing, heck even board-based casual games). I'm sick of seeing my interactive options through a narrow slit.
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right (Score:5, Insightful)
A monitor has a different use case. I'm not watching movies on my monitor terribly often, but I may do video editing. I also have 3 monitors hooked up to my PC. But I only have one big TV for watching movies/TV/console games (media center PC for the video).
My point is that 1080p is more than enough for most people. As the OP said, many people are running their HDTVs at sub-HD resolutions and don't even realize it. I have a pretty large screen and 1080 vertical lines is about the limit of usefulness on it. Most people won't have a TV that large, or a place to put it. So higher-resolution video wins 99% of people absolutely nothing. It'll get a few people with thousands of dollars to throw away bragging rights, and that's about it. We're just reaching the limit of returns for improvements in resolution as far as the physical realities of people's eyes and their lifestyles are concerned. Just like SACD is a lot better technically than a CD [wikipedia.org], but... there's just no compelling reason for it for the vast majority of consumers.
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right (Score:3, Insightful)
Can someone invest as much into the quality of the content, as they are doing for the format?
By "content", I am not just concerning myself with the visual appeal or other superficial characteristic. :-)
Re:How Good is "Good Enough?" (Score:5, Insightful)
And the misconceptions shown in that chart is exactly why we cant have nicer resolutions. That chart details the normal resolving capability of the human eye (one arcminute). The lines he drew there indicate when a person with 20/20 vision would be able to fully resolve each pixel. It does not account that a significant amount of the population can naturally see better than that, nor does it account for the fact that another significant amount of the population wears corrective lenses to see better than that. It does not account for the fact that certain structures like two parallel high contrast lines can be resolved significantly smaller than that. It does not account for the fact that structures smaller than that can still produce visible aliasing artifacts.
Basically, someone somewhere took a couple minutes to find out the meaning of "20/20 vision" and decided that's all the better we ever need, without realizing that the human eye is far more complex than that single value depicts.
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole 1080p thing has obliterated decent computer monitor resolutions. I don't give a rat's buttock about TVs and BluRays and home theater setups and all that crap, but the faster the mainstream media tech goes beyond 1080p, the faster I can have cheap high resolution computer monitors again.
1080 is low resolution garbage when it comes to desktop displays.
Worse than 1080p resolution limitations is the whole 16:9 craze in monitors.... what a useless ratio for work. I really would welcome back the 4:3, although I'm currently putting up with two 16:10 ratio monitors tilted 90degrees (using dual-monitor clamp [amazon.com] and a displaylink device)