Why I won't care about 4K resolution until I have a bigger TV

So along with the OLED wave coming, 4K TV seems to be coming.  4K TV is roughly 4 times the pixels of 1080p: 2x horizontal and 2x vertical.  Now, I think a bajillion pixels per inch would be cool, but would it really matter for the average viewer?  To be more specific, would anyone sitting 6 feet from a 47" TV display even notice a difference between 1080p and 4K resolution TVs?

Let's get some numbers and do some quick geometry.

Fact 1: According to Wikipedia, a healthy (20/20) human eye can discriminate two points that are 1 arc-minute, or 1/60 of 1˚ apart.  How this translates to width depends on the distance between the viewer and the points, as will be discussed.

Fact 2: 1080p means "1080 pixels tall by 1920 pixels wide",  4K means "2160 pixels tall by 4096 pixels wide".

Fact 3: A 47" TV is 23" tall and 41" wide. (This assumes a 16:9 aspect ratio.  If you are really good at mental math, you'll have noticed that 4096:2160 is a 256:135 aspect ratio.  For the rest of this, I'll just pretend that everything is 16:9).

Okay, now the geometry.  We know the minimum angle your eye can resolve, and we're assuming you sit 6 feet from your TV, so we can calculate the minimum distance between points (x below) your eye can resolve.

So, at a viewing distance of 6 feet we know that your eye can distinguish points as long as they are 0.021 inches apart.  What we want to know now is whether the pixels on some TV are far enough apart that your eye can tell the difference.  Instead of pixels per inch, we really want to know the inches per pixel, which we can calculate like this:

Now, let's look at the pixels on the 1080p standard on a 47" TV.  If we just take the horizontal axis, 1080p means 1920 pixels horizontally, and 47" TVs are 41" wide, so we can calculate the distance between horizontal pixels as follows:

So how would it look if we had a 47" 4K display?

The Verdict

The goal for a good TV is to get as many pixels as possible close together, but once you pass the threshold where your eye can't tell the difference any more, it does you no good!  So the test is this: is the distance between pixels on a TV smaller than the distance between points your eyes can distinguish?  

For a 47" TV from 6 feet, pixels are about 0.022 inches apart, and your eye can only distinguish points 0.021 inches apart.  So, if you, like me, are watching a 47" TV from 6 feet, then congratulations!  Your TV has about as many pixels as your eye could ever care about!  So smile and relax, knowing that if someone swapped your set for a 4K display, you wouldn't even notice!  Unless you are sitting closer than 6 feet, you have it made!

If, however, you catch your shows on a 65 incher, or you really like to sit close when you play Halo, be excited for the 4K future of TV!  Of course, at 4x the file sizes, can you imagine how much buffering you'll sit through watching 4K videos on YouTube?!

To appease your curiosity,  I'm including some lines from my spreadsheet looking at other TV sizes.  Remember, the 0.021 inches "resolution" of your eye only applies if you sit 6 feet away, and these show the numbers for size and pixels in the horizontal axis (though vertical should be the same ratio).

3DTV is Awesome. Stop the Hate!

Count how many people are grimacing

and/or looking at the other movie watchers. 

Then see point 4 below.

I've seen a lot of stories in the news talking down about 3D in the home, saying that consumers aren't figuratively or literally buying it.  The literal part is somewhat true, and they have numbers to back it up.  But I have some objections.

1) When they talk about 3DTV sales, they always say something like "disappointing" or "less than analysts expected."

*My Objection:  Analysts saw the set, and thought, "This is AWESOME!!!  EVERYONE will be buying these soon, despite the expected higher-than-not-3D costs."  Eventually, however, sales are modest.  Modest, but not nonexistent, and not nonsignificant.

To me, the big predictions are a testament to the awesomeness of 3DTV.

2) When they talk about why people don't buy 3DTVs, people usually start in on a laundry list of 'sometimes reported' problems like nausea, not being able to see it, etc.  The not being able to see it part is pretty clear, but nobody seems to report numbers for nausea, headaches, and so on.  The problem I see is that most every article I've seen in the news, etc.  is written by some random person who saw a demo at a store for a few minutes.

*My Objection:  Remember the seizure warnings on video games?  Some people have serious problems with that.  Some people also have serious problems eating gluten, while the rest of the world lives our happy gluten-filled lives.  MOST people see 3D just fine, no headaches, nausea, or anything of the kind. And that the people hand down a sentence on technology they saw for 1-2 minutes in a showroom is ridiculous.

3) People keep saying 3D is a "gimmick".

*My Thoughts:  Sure!  In fact, I've been meaning to wear an eyepatch around to abolish this gimmickry from the rest of my life too!  You know how it is, it gets so distracting when you're trying to watch a perfectly flat football game on your perfectly flat TV and you suddenly realize that your kitchen appears further away than your sidetable. In fact, I've thought about turning off color on my TV to stop those darned hues distracting me from the powerful human drama that is "Everybody Loves Raymond".

To be serious, sometimes filmmakers put in gimmicky things, like swords in your face.  Some amusement park rides are rollercoasters, where the motion is manipulated to throw you off guard because you find it more exciting that way, and some rides are Ferris wheels where the motion just adds to the richness of the experience.  If my Ferris wheel took a deep dive, I'd think 'Who the heck made this thing?', not 'I've about had it with these moving amusement park rides.'

4) Well those goofy glasses are just so uncomfortable and weird looking.

*My Objections:

A-Uncomfortable? WHAT?  Okay, maybe the active shutter style ones are uncomfortable, but I wouldn't know as I've never used them. My passive ones, on the other hand, I've worn all the way down the stairs and into my car before I remembered I was wearing them.  And I don't wear glasses.  These things are designed to be light weight, relaxed fitting, functional glasses.  Which leads to my objection to the goofiness argument :

B-Remember how people watch movies in the dark?  And they, most surprisingly, watch movies when they watch movies (as opposed to looking around the room judging everyone).  3DTV is for home use.  Home, you know, where you sometimes walk around in your underpants.  Where you get upset about whether somebody did or did not eat out of your tub of cottage cheese.  Yeah, wouldn't want those 3D glasses to cramp your style.  I'm sure, when you're sloshing your bowl of Cheerios on your Spongebob PJs and "I'm With Stupid ->" shirt that isn't pointing to anyone while watching a movie at 10pm you silently think to yourself 'Thank goodness I don't have those glasses, those might make me look goofy!'

5) There's not much content.

*My thought:  Partly true, and what's there is is expensive.  Just like VHS was.  Just like DVD was.  Just like Blu-ray was.  Just like the internet was.

MAJOR EXCEPTION:  Have a PS3?  Great!  A ton of new games are in 3D, and let me tell you that regardless of how you think 3D in movies is, 3D in games is AWESOME times about 10,000 ±2.  And given that (good) games generally last for hours and hours and have excellent replay value, you suddenly have HUNDREDS of hours of wonderfully immersive 3D content.

Conclusions:
   *Anti-3D hype is way more unfounded than 3D "hype", or "recognition of the awesomeness of 3D" as I prefer to call it.
   *Seriously, 3D is really awesome.

Qualifications:
    *I actually OWN a 3DTV, and use it to play 3D Blu-ray and 3D games, both of which are awesome. Both of which I've seen bad examples of, but I could also say that about movies, food, or people in general, all of which I'm still very fond of.

Changing the blog

So after months of not being bothered to post stuff on here, I've decided to change this blog into my "Whatever I happen to be thinking about at any given time" blog, and post more random thoughts and ideas unfiltered.  Just thought I'd let my readers know.  All 2 of you  :)