What's YOUR resolution? The reality of resolution and distance...

[Todd Anderson]

Alright... let's take HDR/Wide Color out of the discussion and focus on resolution.

At what point does resolution really start to make a difference in your viewing room?

For my living room, I'm squarely in the 1080p zone for a 60" TV... and in my movie room, I'm mighty close to 4K.

How about you?

 

[mechman]

I'm in the 720p range in my living room and 1080p in the theater. The theater is going to change early next year though as I'll be dumping the 'L' shaped sectional for two rows of theater seats with butt kickers. Then the first row will be solidly in the 4K zone!

Excellent topic Todd!

 

[Matthew J Poes]

I have a 100" screen and the front seats are like 10 feet away from the screen or so. Rear seats are about 15 feet away. The front seats are the good seats (since the rear seats are Papasan chairs) so that puts me squarely in the 4K camp it seems. I don't have a 4K projector. I've also set up the frame behind the screen to allow for a simple modification to increase the screen size drastically. The screen could be increased to a 140" diagonal 16:9 screen. In fact, in theory, I could go to a nearly 11-foot wide screen, the width of the room. That is about a 150" screen. If projectors got substantially brighter in the sub-$3k range, I would consider something that nuts. It's not the "correct" field of view, so I can't speak to how that would look.

Todd how does that work? The standards for cinema establish ranges for the field of view the screen should encompass. It seems like the minimum viewing distance for an 8K screen would require a screen so large as to far exceed the accepted field of view standards. I'm doing the mental image of what a 150" screen would be like in my theater, and I'm thinking I would probably find that uncomfortable. It would be hard to see what is going on, to track all the action.

So another question Todd, and I get that there is some science here, but...I have a 42" 4K tv in the bedroom. It sits about 5-6 feet from the bed. I ran 4K and 1080p sharpness patterns and resolution patterns, one of which was supposed to allow you to tell if you can discern the 4K advantage or not. It was clearly obvious from my bed. However, that size and distance places it outside of the accepted range of being worth it by a decent amount, right? I've also watched 4K content and 1080p content on Amazon since those are separate streams and could easily see the sharpness difference (though I will admit, they could be messing with the image in other ways, I have no idea).

Is there any chance that there is not a hard line, as suggested, but more of a fuzzy transition?

I can't see the benefit of 4K without my glasses at nearly any distance, so this test was done with glasses, for what its worth.

 

[Todd Anderson]

Matt, you definitely have to be careful about going too large. You'll end up in a situation where watching content could make you feel dizzy or sick! I'd definitely pay attention to screen size limits.

As for the last question: I'm sure this is a give-or-take chart based on a person's individual eye sight capabilities. Perhaps glasses have magnification effect that trumps that of normal vision?

With Amazon you might be seeing a significant difference if HDR/Wide Color is coming into play... that's one factor that blows standard 1080p out of the water.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Matt, you definitely have to be careful about going too large. You'll end up in a situation where watching content could make you feel dizzy or sick! I'd definitely pay attention to screen size limits.

As for the last question: I'm sure this is a give-or-take chart based on a person's individual eye sight capabilities. Perhaps glasses have magnification effect that trumps that of normal vision?

With Amazon you might be seeing a significant difference if HDR/Wide Color is coming into play... that's one factor that blows standard 1080p out of the water.

I can’t speak to magnification but I would think that if my glasses gave me better than perfect vision it would come up in my vision test. The standard test does assess better than perfect vision and my opthomologist usually lets me attempt the smallest line on the board. I have a weird problem. I’m near sighted. The problem is minor, until this past year I could pass a 20/20 vision test with no glasses. My glasses have prisms in them to address minor double vision (I don’t notice it until it’s corrected). Yet for some reason the difference with and without glasses on detailed images on a screens is night and day.

I don’t really plan to make a 150” screen. There aren’t many projectors that would even work well at that size outside of commercial venue projectors. I had briefly considered it as a means to modify the front wall and allow me a better speaker position. The 100” screen i use is just too narrow for ideal speaker placement. The speakers should ideally be situated where the side bars of the screen are located. To get a screen that moves the bars 6-10 inches out means one that is 1-2 feet wider. That’s about a 112 inch screen. However I was thinking that to create a diffraction free front wall the screen needs to extend from one end to the other. That was the only reason I even bothered to figure out that this would be a 150” screen. Then I thought 4K would be very useful, but at the same time, a nauseating large screen area.

 

[ddude003]

50" at 9 feet in the 1080p zone with a 1080/24p/30p HD Sony Bravia TV here... Have liked Sony since working with their Shamu (4kx3kx24bit color tube) project many years back (early 90s)... That thing was a monster and oh so beautiful... Studios, SFX and Post Production houses as well as many signal and image processing teams when crazy for these things...

 

[Todd Anderson]

50" at 9 feet in the 1080p zone with a 1080/24p/30p HD Sony Bravia TV here... Have liked Sony since working with their Shamu (4kx3kx24bit color tube) project many years back (early 90s)... That thing was a monster and oh so beautiful... Studios, SFX and Post Production houses as well as many signal and image processing teams when crazy for these things...

You’re definitely right in the sweet spot zone for 9-ft.... add another 20” screen diagonal and 4K becomes worth it. That’s a fairly big difference!

 

[Todd Anderson]

I can’t speak to magnification but I would think that if my glasses gave me better than perfect vision it would come up in my vision test. The standard test does assess better than perfect vision and my opthomologist usually lets me attempt the smallest line on the board. I have a weird problem. I’m near sighted. The problem is minor, until this past year I could pass a 20/20 vision test with no glasses. My glasses have prisms in them to address minor double vision (I don’t notice it until it’s corrected). Yet for some reason the difference with and without glasses on detailed images on a screens is night and day.

I don’t really plan to make a 150” screen. There aren’t many projectors that would even work well at that size outside of commercial venue projectors. I had briefly considered it as a means to modify the front wall and allow me a better speaker position. The 100” screen i use is just too narrow for ideal speaker placement. The speakers should ideally be situated where the side bars of the screen are located. To get a screen that moves the bars 6-10 inches out means one that is 1-2 feet wider. That’s about a 112 inch screen. However I was thinking that to create a diffraction free front wall the screen needs to extend from one end to the other. That was the only reason I even bothered to figure out that this would be a 150” screen. Then I thought 4K would be very useful, but at the same time, a nauseating large screen area.

I don’t know Matt - I’m starting to thinking i need to go see an eye doctor about these “glasses.” Can you see through walls, by any chance?

Interesting that you’re considering speaker placement in relation to screen size. I’d assume most people find that screens can push speakers too far to the outside of a room / near boundaries. But I guess that’s totally variable!

 

[tripplej]

I have a Samsung LED 75 inch 1080p TV and I sit 12.5 ft away. Any closer and it would be just too big for my eyes. lol.