Is the World Ready for 4K?

The race for resolution didn't play out as expected, I remember reading a while back after the 4K rollout and it's poor market acceptance that the push now would be for more color accuracy and higher dynamic range.

Yeah I was going to say that the only reason for 20/24/42MP cameras is big prints. Pretty much zero value on screen. I've never made bigger than 30x45cm prints on 10mp camera and the quality is good enough that you can have your nose up against the print and can't see anything but pure smooth image at low ISO so I've always assumed if I had ever printed bigger with 10mp camera I'd be fine. I've made 40x60cm prints with 24MP cameras and same thing: your nose up against the print and there are zero artefacts. And in my opinion you print for the space you're going to put the photo, so a very large print for instance isn't necessarily designed to have your nose right up against it. The whole point is to be able to stand back from it and look at the whole photo.

But then I shouldn't make these arguments to vehemently, the secret MP police may come after me!

Hi Miranda, Help please, how do we get to 12Mp?

A 4k/8Mp screen is a 3:1 pixel mapping to a 24Mp sensor, and a 1080p is 12:1. OTOH, neither screen resolution seems to map cleanly to a 6k x 4k 24Mp sensor. That's where we get into screen ratios, 720p, 1080p, 4k and FUHD (8k) are all 16:9 ratios, not 3:2 as is coming off the sensor. Makes my head hurt . I expect the remapping the display adapter has to do to show us an image without distortion further degrades display sharpness.

I am tempted to dig out my A100 and shoot a side by side with the a6500. My guess is that at 4k I won't be able to tell them apart beyond that the colors off the old CCD sensor will be better. No wonder some of us have been happy with our old Minolta glass. We can't see much but dollar signs in expensive new glass. Think the Sony engineers sit around in the evenings over drinks laughing that for the latest and greatest camera body @ $3,200 they'll move the video button, give us a joystick, a bigger battery and 2 card slots? Or that for another couple of thousand bucks we can't see a sharpness difference between a $20 dollar relic and a $2,000 dollar new lens?

I'm using two monitors for a low tech editing solution, one placed landscape and the other portrait. I generally use the landscape oriented screen for editing, but with portrait shots, the portrait oriented screen comes in handy. The price premium has come so far off new screens, it is not very expensive to throw TVs at the problem. FWIW, 1280x1024 is a 5:4 ratio. That was an oddball for native ratio. Most VGA variations from base 640x480 or like 1024x768 were 4:3. None of the common computer displays have ever been 3:2.

Funny you should mention it, I've got an old roughly square 17" monitor/Tv. The back light quit, but I couldn't stand to throw it out because I paid a hundred dollars an inch for it in 2000. I keep threatening to get a replacement part and fix it, but never quite get around to it.     

Makes sense. At this point we've got a measure of crop limits before losing resolution. For display at 4k it is about 8Mp, 1/3 of a 24Mp frame and less than 1/5 of a 42Mp. For 1080p it is about 2Mp, 1/12th and 1/20th of a frame respectively. Not only is 4k indistinguishable from 1080p from more than several feet, depending on screen size, but 1080p is indistinguishable from 720p, that's about 1Mp, at more than about 5-6 feet on a large screen.

4k on a large screen is indistinguishable from 720p from a reasonable viewing distance. 720p was superseded by 1080p the better part of a decade ago. Sensors have out resolved viewing screens at least since the Minolta 5D era. The last real increase we've been able to see on from a reasonable viewing distance was when VGA transitioned to 720p. Even that was not dramatic if the move was from XVGA or higher, and with that we are back to the scan rates, phosphor dot pitch and electron gun focus of CRTs.

It puts a fine point on the silliness of pixel peepers blowing images way up to show artifacts and resolution fall off or lens tests that highlight defects that will never show up on a screen. It is also helps explain the rise of phone based photography. It is a variation on the old cartoon, on the internet no one can tell you're a dog.

It might not be a bad idea for Dyxum to update its picture posting size to 720p, 1366x768. That produces a file that is only marginally larger than the current guideline of 1024x960. Neither correspond to sensor 3:2 ratio, but 720p at least hits a display standard. An alternative would be to drop back to 1024x768 the XVGA standard.

This discussions also makes me wonder about the sharpness ratings in Dyxum's lens review data base. We cannot see much of the resolution of sensors. How much of the lens sharpness ratings are based on usable lens performance and how much to other factors, like focus, coatings and herding to cluster with previous ratings?

There is no 1024x960 display format. That was the point I was making. There are 1024x768 and 1280x960, those are obsolescent XVGA and SXGA respectively. HD Ready (720p) is 1280x720 and HD basic at 1366x768 are newer standards. Neither of which will display 960 vertical pixels. We have to get to 1080p to resolve 960 pixels, but that remaps to 1080 high and the horizontal is an unacceptable 1920 pixels wide. The VGA derived standards are a 4:3 ratio, and all HD related standards are 16:9 ratios, versus the sensor 3:2. HD Ready produces files 6.7% smaller than the Dyxum standard, and HD Basic 6.7% larger.

What I was suggesting was that Dyxum's upload standard might conform to a display standard, preferably one of the HD 16:9s. 1024x960 does not seem to do that, nor does it appear to match a native sensor format. You have now made me curious what the logic to the Dyxum upload sizing format is, beyond "not too big" (with which I entirely agree). Help please.

edits: extend and quantify screen display standards and ratios

Edited by Cliff - 12 December 2017 at 19:13

Thank you, I will pursue it over there. Please understand that the reasoning for specific 1024x960 rather than a similar sized HD display standard is not addressed at the link you provided.

Specifically the question may be is Dyxum ready for HD, a narrower subset of is the world ready for 4k.