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Study Boldly Claims 4K And 8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes, But Is It True? (hothardware.com)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A new study published in Nature by University of Cambridge researchers just dropped a pixelated bomb on the entire Ultra-HD market, but as anyone with myopia can tell you, if you take your glasses off, even SD still looks pretty good :)

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[–] 287 points 10 months ago (17 children)

Kind of a tangent, but properly encoded 1080p video with a decent bitrate actually looks pretty damn good.

A big problem is that we've gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube's 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.

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  • [–] 113 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    Yeah I'd way rather have higher bitrate 1080 than 4k. Seeing striping in big dark or light spots on the screen is infuriating

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I was wondering when we’d get to the snake oil portion of the video hobby that audiophiles have been suffering. 8k vs. 4k is the new lossy vs. lossless argument.

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  • [–] 45 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.

    YouTube is locking the good bitrates behind the premium paywall and even as a premium users you don't get to select a high bitrate when the source video was low res.

    That's why videos should be upscaled before upload to force YouTube into offering high bitrate options at all. A good upscaler produces better results than simply stretching low-res videos.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    I think the premium thing is a channel option. Some channels consistently have it, some don't.

    Regular YouTube 1080p is bad and feels like 720p. The encoding on videos with "Premium 1080p" is catastrophic. It's significantly worse than decently encoded 480p. Creators will put a lot of time and effort in their lighting and camera gear, then the compression artifacting makes the video feel like watching a porn bootleg on a shady site. I guess there must be a strong financial incentive to nuke their video quality this way.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I can still find 480p videos from when YouTube first started that rival the quality of the compressed crap “1080p” we get from YouTube today. It’s outrageous.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    Sadly most of those older YouTube videos have been run through multiple re-compressions and look so much worse than they did at upload. It's a major bummer.

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    This. The visual difference of good vs bad 1080p is bigger than between good 1080p and good 4k. I will die on this hill. And Youtube's 1080p is garbage on purpose so they get you to buy premium to unlock good 1080p. Assholes

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    The 1080p for premium users is garbage too. Youtube's video quality in general is shockingly poor. If there is even a slight amount of noisy movement on screen (foliage, confetti, rain, snow, etc) the the video can literally become unwatchable.

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