05-23-2012, 01:43 PM
Grieve Wrote:It's double 1080p (or 4X total), so the upscaling should be more straightforward than for SD shows to HD. I mean VHS is what, 333x480? That's a huge jump to 1920x1080. No wonder old shows look crap. A HD show should still look good in QHD, just not as good as a native 4K movie or show.Just to reiterate, more pixels does not automatically equate to better visual quality.
Visual quality comes in the form of good props, good makeup, good lighting and that sort of thing. The monster that looked scary in SD will look like a very obvious man in a rubber suit in HD. (I think I was watching Atlantis when I upgraded from a 720 rear projection to a 1080 Samsung LCD and the improvement in picture made Atlantis on SciFi HD go from looking like a high-production show to something more like the old Dr. Who. Every flaw was way more obvious.)
Quote:Looks like that will be jumping up soon. Apple's next line of Macs and Macbooks appears likely to be retina (2,880 by 1,800 for a 15.4" MacBook Pro, and potentially a monster 5120x2880 for a 27" iMac), which will likely drive the same thing across the Windows PC industry as well.That's actually way too much resolution imo. I have a 1920x1200 25.5" monitor. Doubling that resolution wouldn't really help -- I don't think it would give me any more real estate because my text is already as small as I would let it be for comfortable reading. It might be interesting in games but I'm not real sure how modern video cards would handle a resolution that big, or how much you'd really gain from it, visually. We're already limited more by texture quality, video memory and GPU speed than we are by a lack of pixels. And if I could drive that many pixels, I'd rather have a gaming setup with 3 monitors using conventional resolutions than one monitor with 5120x2880 resolution. Even for software development I'd rather have multiple conventional monitors than one UltraHD monitor. Being able to display text so small that I need a magnifying glass to read it doesn't really help.
For video, you're lucky to get streaming video in 720 today. 1080 is so much bandwidth that not all broadband can support it. I have a hard time seeing us streaming 5120x2880 anytime soon.
In fact, I'm curious if a Blu-Ray disk could hold a movie at that resolution. ("Insert Disk 2 to continue.")
UltraHD sounds like a gimmick.