Resolution in the New Year

We're at the dawn of the 4K ultra-high-definition TV era. What does resolution really mean? And is there a limit?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says, there's
Frank's remote control. You can look, but don't touch it please.

(00:20):
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. Hello everyone, Hello Joe.
How are you all doing today? How about you? I'm
doing just fine. Yeah, I got a question for both
of you? Did you make any New Year's resolution? See
that joke's only funny if you already know what the
topic is, and then it's not even funny, But it's

(00:42):
a good point. We're talking about. We're talking about resolution,
television resolution. In this episode, I recently attended c e
S and one of the big things that's always a
huge presence at c S is uh, it's high definition
and beyond TVs. Jonathan, I have a question for you.
Ask me your question, Joe. Okay, while you were at

(01:05):
cs what was the greatest number of TVs you were
ever watching at the same time simultaneously. That oh, probably
somewhere in the realm of forty because there are entire
walls that are just made up of various televisions and displays,
so sometimes they all work together to form one image,

(01:27):
but you're still watching forty different TVs. Is it like
at best Buy where they're all showing the same Mark
Wahlberg movie at the same time, or do they have
different stuff playing? They had different what Mark Wahlberg movies
playing simultaneously. No, Actually, the it depended on the the
place you were at and what the TVs were trying

(01:47):
to show, like anything that's doing ultra high definition and
beyond or I guess you could just say uh D
because technically eight K is still in that category. Uh
tends to have a loop of various you know, supposed
to be all inducing images, things that have lots of
different color and contrast, something where the detail is really

(02:09):
important in the image. There's usually no um, no content
that has like dialogue or anything. It's all about images.
So uh you know, usually it's it's also video because
you don't want to have just a still photo up there.
But it will be like a Chinese dragon at a parade.
That's that's a typical one, right, sunrises or ocean you know,

(02:35):
something like like fish beneath the sea, that kind of thing.
So it's all about, you know, lots of different colors
and vibrant and uh images and lots of motion to
really show off what the televisions are capable of. And
I wanted to kind of talk a little bit in
this episode about what resolution is because you know, now
we're in that era of four K becoming the standard,

(02:58):
Like it's I would say that the year is the
first time we're really seeing four K move beyond the
early adopter stage and try to push into mainstream, which
means that a lot of people probably have questions about
it and they're wondering what exactly sets it apart, how
is it different from earlier versions, and and you know,
just kind of an overview Yeah, yeah, because I mean

(03:19):
you see all of this kind of marketing or advertising
material all the time about how totally awesome this new
television is and how much you need it in your
house right now. Um, And I have well, I mean
it's I do because I've researched this kind of stuff
for tech stuff in this episode before. UM, but I
don't think that the average consumer really has a good

(03:40):
grip on what any of that means. Yeah. Yeah, And
and furthermore, like yeah, like like, where is all of
this technology moving towards in the future? Like, are are
we going to get to sixteen K? Is it going
to be thirty two K? That? What? Will we just
have television screens literally in our eyeballs? I mean that's
these are all great questions and we're going to be

(04:00):
looking at them, uh figuratively because this is an audio podcast.
But yeah, no, this is this is exactly why I
wanted to have this conversation. Okay, So the numbers that
are represented when you hear people bragging about their different
screen resolutions, you know, we've got tin ADP or we've
got four K. What do those numbers mean? What do
they represent? All right? Those numbers represent a basic unit

(04:24):
called a pixel. And you can kind of think of
pixel as like a point of light on your television.
And that point of light can be various colors, doesn't
have to be you know, just pure white or whatever.
But your your television screen, the image on the screen
is made up of a collection of pixels, all of
various colors, changing at a speed that's faster than we

(04:47):
can detect with the naked eye. And that's what gives
us the illusion of Hey, there's Matthew McConaughey, uh being
awesome on my TV. Yeah. Yeah, each pixel has the
capacity to be I mean basically red, green, or blue. Yeah, yeah,
it's really what we're looking at, any combination of those really,
and it's also, yeah, the intensity of the light behind

(05:08):
it can help, uh indicate what color it's supposed to be.
And it's the fact that we have so many that
we can actually represent colors other than red, green, and blue.
This is using the additive property of color to get
various colors. So if you had red, green, and blue
light and you shine them all on a central spot,

(05:28):
the very center of that's going to look white. It's
that additive property where red and blue overlap. That's where
you're going to get the purples. And it's it's interesting
because if you think of back to um, you know,
the primary colors, you'd say, well, wait a minute, now,
I remember there was like red, yellow, and blue. I
don't remember green being in there, and it's all very

(05:49):
about what about cyan and magenta? Well yeah, And that's
the thing is that we're talking about different approaches like
light based versus inc based, additive versus subtractive you know,
they're there are a lot of different ways of looking
at color. And it just turns out that with televisions
we're talking about the r g B. I mean, you
probably have seen r GB connectors for various types of

(06:09):
televisions and displays. So now we've established we've got all
these pixels. The each pixel is divided into subpixels. Typically
that's red, green, and blue. Uh, and those are what
will determine the color of the image that you see.
But what makes the difference between Let's say I break
up my old inns and I look and I go
to play Super Mario World or Super Mario Brothers, which

(06:33):
was the first one, Super Mario Brothers Brothers. You're right, yeah,
So there we've got a Mario that if you look
close as pretty clearly composed of some squares. There are
individually colored squares, and if you zoom in wag in
on him, he's kind of spiky, like he's got some
hard corners. But if you go to the next generation
and play Super Mario Brothers or Super Mario World, I

(06:55):
guess then on Super nes suddenly Mario is much smoother.
And then if you go to the next generation smoother still, right,
what's going on this is because those pixels. Now in
this case we're talking about the capacity of the device
to output pixel count, not not your television, but the

(07:16):
NES and s and e s and these cases the
same kind of effect, right exactly. H It's you know,
the size of the pixels matter because the larger the pixels,
the more you're going to be able to detect the
individual pixels. And you'll see those hard edges because pixels
essentially a little square, and if those squares are large enough,
you're gonna be able to detect detect the corners. Like

(07:36):
you were talking about the The example I always give
is that imagine that you are given a bunch of
wooden blocks of different colors, and you're told to create
a picture using those wooden blocks, like show a representation
of a car. And you've got some blue wooden blocks
and some black wooden blocks, and the black ones are
gonna be the tires, and the blue ones are gonna
be the car. But you only have twenty blocks total,

(07:57):
or the image can only be twenty blocks large. It's
gonna be a really blocky car, like straight out of
the mid eighties. But if you wanted to have something
that had a lot more kind of smooth contours. What
you would want to do is have the size of
those blocks and double their number, and now you can
make that same picture, but you're using twice as many

(08:19):
blocks that are half the size. It's gonna look a
little better. You do that again. It's gonna look a
little better. You do this enough, and the human eye
will no longer be able to differentiate the edges of
those tiny blocks because they're so small. It looks like
a continuous image to us. That's the basis for television resolution.
You want to have as tiny a pixel as you

(08:39):
possibly can and a high concentration of them in order
for the image on the screen to be a high resolution.
Um So, technically we could say that a television's resolution
is the number of pixels that are displayed on a screen.
And this raises another interesting point, which is that you

(09:00):
can have two different TVs of two different sizes at
the same resolution. They're gonna have the same number of pixels.
But that means that the pixels on the bigger TV
have to be larger because they have more space to
fill up. So if you have a forty inch high
definition television ten a d P t V. Then you
have a thousand eighty lines of pixels going across in

(09:24):
one direction. And I'll talk more about the directions in
a little bit. But let's say that you've got a
ten A d P eighty inch television. Well, your eight
inch TV is twice the size, I mean, at least
on the diagonal of the forty inch It actually gets
a little more complicated than that, but it has the
same number of pixels as that forty inch TV. So
it's possible that something that looks amazing on a relatively

(09:47):
smaller TV doesn't look as amazing on a larger TV
if they're both at the same resolution. You have to
increase the resolution of the larger televisions to make it
that make the quality remain the same, right, or you
have to back up further away from the larger pixeled television. Yeah,
this this raises another interesting point. We're gonna be nailing

(10:08):
this sucker home as we go through this. The the
quality of the image on a television is relative to
many factors, the resolution of the television, the size of
the television, and your viewing distance. Because the human eye,
you know, our our our ability to pick out detail,
decreases as distance increases, And of course for some of us,

(10:30):
we have better vision than others. I used to have
pretty crappy vision, and then I had laser surgery, and
now my vision is normal. It's not great like it's
it's it's essentially which is you know, considered normal vision. Um,
so that's that's definitely a factor. All of those things
are factors. So even the technological aspect of this is

(10:54):
somewhat um mediated by the fact of how far away,
like our physical surroundings, how far away we are from
that television. If the TV is eighty inches and it's
high resolution, like the same as that forty inch TV,
but we're twice as far away from it as we
were from our forty inch televisions, then things kind of look, Okay,

(11:14):
that's rough numbers. I mean, that's not exactly the case,
but it's it's you know, you get the idea. So, yeah,
this is this is all stuff we have to take
into account. So let's kind of look at what resolution
really means. Now in the old days, we're talking about
within height. I mean, we still are talking about within height,
but the designation has changed a little bit. So the

(11:36):
unit of measurement is the pixel. And if you were
looking at a nineteen twenty by ten eight screen, that's
one thousand pixels wide or number of vertical lines of
pixels by one thousand eighty pixels tall, or a number
of horizontal lines of pixels. And that's the resolution for
a ten a d P screen. Uh. So the ten

(11:59):
eight is all of those horizontal lines. That's important because
when we get to four K, we no longer look
at horizontal lines. We look at vertical lines because of course,
we need to make this more confusing. Um that's my
favorite thing about technology. Yeah, it's like when we decide
the standard needs to be flip flopped, and we need
to talk about this other number because if we talked
about the first number, it wouldn't be as uh fascinating

(12:21):
and exciting because it wouldn't be as big anyway. Uh.
The reason for the difference, obviously, is that our televisions
are wider than they are tall. So this has been
the case for ages, although of course the aspect ratio
has changed. We'll talk about that in a second. So
let's start with standard resolution. There's still channels that broadcasting

(12:42):
standard resolution. There are televisions that are displaying it in
standard resolution resolution. You might have a standard resolution TV
in your home. UM, in the United States, standards resolution
television is at four eight interlaced lines of resolution or
four A d I, and that uses a standard called
in T s C, So that's technically seven four pixels

(13:04):
by pixels. Now, in Europe they used the PAL system
p L and that is five seventies six I. So
technically the European UH televisions were a slightly higher resolution
than the North American ones. Um, both of these are interlaced.
That's different from progressive. I'm not going to go into that. Yeah,

(13:26):
we'll just barely touch on it because that gets that's
almost an entire episode all on its own. UM. So
then we moved to high definition resolution. Now, do you
guys remember when HDTV was first coming out? Yeah pretty much. Yeah,
I remember it because I remember when it first came out.
HD televisions were and they were crazy expensive like they were.

(13:49):
They were an order of magnitude more expensive than your
average televisions. And of course this is also still in
the era of the big TVs, right, like not not
the flat screens. They still television still had tubes in them. Yeah,
I still have a television like that. Actually, I have
one in storage. I don't have one actively being used

(14:12):
as a television or display on my laptops, though I
had one that I'm pretty sure Rachel made me get
rid of together. Well, my only VHS player is attached
to it. You're killing me here, forward thinking and Lawrence
enjoying her entertainment on clay tablets. This is a weird
discussion for me because my favorite way of enjoying a

(14:34):
piece of visual media is a third generation VHS tape
of something from the eighties. Yeah, there are plenty of
YouTube videos that are directly taken from that kind of content.
I know because I watched one just the other day.
Computers are Humans? Are Computers are people too? Was the
name of the program forty six minutes. Okay, but so
but so high deaf. Yes, this is where we start

(14:56):
off with twenty Uh that was the resolution and high
definition we saw, which is one thousand pixels by pixels.
And that's that's a really decent resolution if your television
is you know, for the inches or smaller um, I
mean it's it's not terrible for larger than that. But

(15:16):
that's really where where it's sweet spot was but then
you also had nine, which was the you know ten
a d P or I whether it was progressive or
interlaced um and yeah, a quickside note on what exactly
that means. Um Interlaced is the classic way that a
screen updates its image. Okay, it was kind of a

(15:37):
clever way for screen makers to get around the fact
that they had this kind of relatively poor energy efficiency
and and poor speed, uh like just just technological programmable
speed of these older screens, um and and so uh
like we were talking about the screens. Pixels are coated

(15:58):
as horizontal lines, and the odd numbered lines would refresh first,
then the even numbered lines would refresh. So the full
screen would refresh as as relatively slowly as thirty times
a second, which sounds fast when you say that something
happens thirty times a second, but really your your vision
is absorbing a lot faster than that. So yeah, so

(16:20):
what we're saying here is that each of these is refreshing,
uh like, you know, twice as fast, but the full
the full screen you're getta get thirty because or maybe
half as time is anyway, you're getting the full screen
at thirty times a second because it's showing you half
of the image. It's just every other line. Uh. And

(16:40):
then it it switches very very very quickly. Uh. And
then progressive scan screens are capable of refreshing the entire
image at once, um, which means that the image updates
twice as fast as an interlaced screens. Right, and so
you get um, you know, better image quality for things
that have a lot of fast moving action and yeah, yeah,

(17:00):
especially in action scenes, it looks so much smoother. Yeah.
So uh that's why you know, back in the HD
days when people were shopping for televisions and ten a
DP became kind of a standard because at first it
was one of those things that was a premium like
you know, you can find ten a d i uh
television sets, but Tina Tina ADP were more expensive and

(17:21):
more rare. Um. Now they are pretty much the standard
for any h D that's above like. Um, now we
get to what is being pushed as the news standard,
something that's entering into the mainstream. And we, like I
said before, we've seen this creep into uh television series
for a while, like vary the various series offered by

(17:44):
various manufacturers but now it's like that's the main thing
that's being put onto store shelves, and that's four K.
So four K is a type of ultra high definition.
That's weird because I feel like I saw somewhere online
that ultra high definite is actually different than four K. UH.
You know, uh D has also has also been used

(18:07):
to describe everything from two K to eight K. But
uh part of the issue is also there are conflicting
approaches to compressing and streaming uh D content. We'll talk
about that towards the end. One of the things that's
actually kind of indicative that this is still the very

(18:29):
early days for ultra high definition UM. But you know,
the the industry standard for four K is four thousand,
ninety six by two thousand, one hundred sixty. However, u
h D is actually three thousand, eight hundred forty by
two thousand, one hundred sixty, so it's slightly lower than

(18:49):
actual four K. Now, the reason why it's called four
K is that if you do the math and you
multiply the numbers of a ten eighty HD television and
you you you multiply those together, and then you multiply
that by four you have the same number of pixels
in a four k uh D television, So it's four

(19:09):
times the number of pixels even though it's not four
thousand lines of pixels. Yeah. So so this is where
this terminology really gets confusing, right, because one, it's four times,
but it's not four k in the sense that, you know,
instead of one thousand eighty horizontal lines, now you have
four thousand horizontal lines. And to make it even more confusing,
we're not talking horizontal lines anymore. We're talking vertical lines.

(19:33):
We're talking about how wide the TV is, not how
tall the TV is. And so, instead of taking the
second number of that ratio, which is what we had
been doing, you know, remember nine, now we're taking the
first number, so the three thousand, hundred forty instead of
the two thousand, one hundred sixty. Now do you think

(19:53):
that this is a marketing ploy in order to get
people excited about that bigger number. I think so, simply
because maybe it's one of those deals that one it
gets people more excited because it's a bigger number. To
calling something twenty one six d P instead of four k,
it starts getting really unwieldy as well. I think they

(20:14):
should term it in terms of the number of photons
that are being employed on each screen. I mean that
would be a big number. I'd buy that. Well, you
gotta multiply the two numbers together, your tone Abountain, Yeah,
well that's a big number. Well, then you'd really like
eight K. A K has four times the number of
pixels as four K, not twice four times the number.

(20:37):
Because the the individual numbers seven thousand, six hundred eighty
by four thousand, three hundred twenty, I mean that when
you multiply them together, you will get four times the
number of pixels from a four KTV or sixteen times
the number of pixels you would find in a ten
D H D cent. I'm not sure that this is
how multiplication works. I would like to let the tell

(21:00):
vision industry now that eight is not Yeah. Yeah, I
just just putting that out there. I mean, I know,
I mean, I think what I can say is I
can see why there's confusion in the consumer marketplace because
none of the numbers really make intuitive sense. I think
it's all because these are the ways that the industry

(21:20):
has agreed to market these sets, and that I mean,
the numbers are meaningful, but it's just that you know,
it takes them digging to figure out what exactly they
do mean. I'm just saying, if I had had the
opportunity like I would have totally called the next step
up sixteen K, because again, anyway, sixteen nobody asked me.

(21:41):
Shockingly enough, I am not the earworm in any television industry.
I'm guessing that the eight K is supposed to mean
the number of vertical lines of pixels, but even then
it's being um, it's it's it's rounding up because it's
not eight thousand, it's seven thousand, six eighty, but seven
point six K or seven point seven K if you

(22:04):
want to just round up to the tent All right,
So why does all of this matter? I mean, if
the numbers are meaningful, what do they mean? Okay, So
there are a couple of things we have to take
into account. One of them is that they're meaningful in
the sense that a higher resolution set can't has the
potential of showing you many more subtle gradations of focus,

(22:26):
so that you can actually see a lot more detail
in images that your television simply was not capable of
showing before. And this could be a big deal if
you are a filmmaker. Um, it actually can mean be
a big deal for a couple of different reasons. But
the big one is that if I want to tell
a story and I'm using the visual medium of film

(22:47):
or video or whatever, and I know that my audience
is going to be viewing this on televisions in the future,
I want those TVs to have the resolution that is
going to be capable of translating the visual ls my
story as accurately as possible, especially if I'm the kind
of filmmaker that really relies on on imagery to get

(23:08):
across emotional impact or an important element of the plot.
One of those things where you can maybe because the
way the focus of the shot it has been uh composed,
you see an element in that you might not even
consciously identify, but it is an important part of the story.
And then later you think, oh, yeah, I remember seeing

(23:29):
that that shelf they wound up using later. Right. That
goes back to the rule of if you have a
rifle mounted on the wall, then at some point a
character has to fire that rifle. Yeah, I believe that's right.
I think you're right. So yeah, but this is this
is one of those things like we just can't get
the resolution to see guns well. Just the point being

(23:50):
that if you if you are taking the artistry of
visual storytelling too as far as far as you can technologically,
then you need to know that your audience has the
capability of actually seeing them. When I go through the trouble,
I'd say, what it seems to allow for to me
is a lot of added subtlety. Yes, not so much

(24:11):
that you're going to be able to see big new
plot points, but no, no, but well, I mean or
an actor's performance. I mean, if you've gone to the
trouble of getting a good actor and lighting them well,
then being able to see that the subtleties in uh
Walter White's face when he's having a complete mental breakdown beautiful.

(24:31):
I mean, these are these are things that they can
even if it's not like important to the plot, it
could be important to the emotional impact of something makers made. Yeah.
I I agree you will probably be able to see
the image better and that that's a good thing. But
on top of that, it also means that we can
get bigger TVs without without a decrease in quality, because

(24:54):
with the with these these tinier pixels with higher resolution,
with more pixels in the in the frame, you can
go larger without having a perceptible decrease in image quality.
You know, this just now made me wonder, and I
didn't bring this up before the podcast because I just
thought of it. Yeah, I wonder if this could lead
to pixels ever replacing projection in movie theaters, so essentially

(25:20):
having a giant digital television or display, rather than a
screen upon which it reflects the light, you would have
one that's actually acting as a giant TV. I'm not
saying I think that should happen, the technology would have
to advance really significantly, like incredibly significant. Yeah, because we
don't have a resolution of television. First of all, uh,

(25:42):
I know a lot of filmmakers who are still lamenting
the death of film because film itself already has an
effective resolution much higher than what our digital representation is
capable of showing. But secondly, yeah, when you're talking about
the size of a movie screen, even something like eight K,
which is hard to even imagine on the scale of

(26:03):
a regular TV, is not gonna be sufficient for the
size of a movie screen. Um. That being said, you know,
we are able to buy bigger and bigger televisions as
prices go down. You know, the manufacturing processes get better,
the materials get cheaper. Uh, the adoption gets larger, and
we start seeing prices come down. There are people who

(26:24):
have pretty big TVs and they're not necessarily increasing the
distance there their viewing distance. If you were increasing your
viewing distance, then you know those two elements together, the
higher resolution and the increased viewing distance would mean that
you would think your image quality was fantastic. Right, But
we're sitting closer and closer. So if you have a

(26:46):
huge television, a living rooms have not gotten bigger to accommodate. No,
my mine certainly has not increased in size. Uh. Yeah,
So if we get a big If I get a
larger television and I'm sitting the same distance it's away, uh,
and it and the pixels aren't small enough, I will
start to notice I can like see where the little

(27:06):
differences are if and that can be distracting. So, but
I mean, it's it's most important that I don't know.
Tony Stark is life size on your screen? Yeah? No,
I want I want every human head on my TV
screen to be larger than a real human head. I
want to be able to pose it and stand next
to the screen and tell who I'm shorter than. Oh,

(27:29):
now see this would be important for Holidack technology. That's true.
That's true. We got a thing needs to be life size.
We've got always go. Yeah, you wouldn't want to have
like all of the holiday figures to look like Mario
from Super Mario Brothers. Would just be really distracting. Or
even everything just be like seven eighths size. It would
be real weird, Like that would be creepy. Everyone's slightly

(27:50):
shorter than they need to be. But that's how real
movie stars actually are. If you see them their seventh
seven eighths of what you predicted. Yeah, that's true. I
was in movie and uh that was huge. It's enormous,
and I actually this is all true. I was in
a film and I turned to my wife after they
showed my entrance and I said, I think I just

(28:12):
scared myself. Uh yeah, it was not. It was not
an accurate representation of who I am. Is what I'm
getting at. So there are other things that matter besides resolution,
and we definitely need to mention them because a lot
of just like with cameras, where people start to really
pun intended focus on how many megapixels there are in

(28:34):
a digital camera, as ever not intended. Sometimes they slip
out and I didn't realize I was making one. This
time I stopped and acknowledged it. But yeah, megapixel count
in a camera is important, but it's not the most
or the only factor. Like you know, you gotta worry
about lenses and all this other stuff and the quality
of the sensor everything like that same sort of thing

(28:56):
is true with televisions. The resolution isn't is not the
only factor you have to consider. So one thing is
color reproduction. How well does the television accurately reproduce the
colors that are being displayed. So if you've got a
television with really good color reproduction, then you know that
you're seeing about as close to what was captured in

(29:19):
the original device, whether it was film or video or whatever,
as you can possibly get. I sometimes get the sense
if you ever go into a store and look at
all the TVs they're trying to sell that on those
display models, they turn the color saturation way up to
try to like or I don't maybe it's the contrast,
it's something they do something to try to boost the

(29:40):
intensity of the image. Well, you know, you're in a
brightly lit environment with florescent lights, so it's not an
ideal viewing experience. It's not the way most of us
would be watching at home. You know, at home we
often will have you know, we might have florescent lights
as since we might be using those as light bulbs.
But a lot of people like to watch and deem

(30:01):
viewing conditions, and in order to get across the quality
of a screen, they calibrate those to be as uh
impactful as possible within the store experience. The other question
to ask is are they calibrating them all fairly or
are they boosting some of the more expensive units so
that you would look at those and say, well, clearly,

(30:23):
this one's better than this cheap one down here, so
I obviously need to get this one, which they have
done the television equivalent of applying an Instagram filtered two. Yeah,
it's it's actually you know, there are entire blogs out
there about various stores that have, uh have tweaked settings
so that they give an unfair advantage to some of

(30:44):
the higher end models than the lower ones, even if
the actual differences are you know, negligible to the average viewer.
Now that being said that, you know, there are TVs
that are of higher quality than others and you can
actually see it. Yeah, I don't. So I don't mean
to suggest that all televisions are the same and that

(31:05):
you're being cheated if you go to one of these stores.
It's just one of those things that has been reported. Um.
And and obviously unless you're there when they're calibrating the television,
you can't really be sure. And you should keep in
mind that the experience you get in the store is
not necessarily what you're gonna get at home until you
calibrate your television for your home viewing environment, right, And
and that calibration, yes, so it includes the color reproduction

(31:29):
and then also the contrast, which is another thing that
Joe just mentioned. Yeah. Contrast is the difference between the
brightest white colors on your TV and the darkest black
colors on your TV. Uh. And here's we're gonna enter
into another hazy element of the world of TV. And
that's you probably have seen contrast ratios like so many

(31:51):
thousand to one and you wonder what they mean, so
does everybody else, Because there's not a standardized lang blodge
here when it comes to contrast. Contrast is a real thing.
You know, there are differences between the brightest and the
darkest colors, and you want that just that you want
that difference to be as great as possible, so that
you can have as many different subtle variations as possible

(32:15):
for that television to display to give you the the
greatest range of potential images. But there's no agreed upon
standard way of saying this, so comparing one television versus
another is really hard to do. Even within a single
manufacturer's series of televisions. It's hard to do, let alone

(32:38):
different manufacturers. So just something to keep in mind, contrast
is important. Then usually you can kind of tell that
just from you know, if you want to watch, you know,
have something really dark, put onto the TV, something that
has loved scenes that are shot in dim or dark conditions,
like any Batman movie, And if you can't make out
the details the contrast, it's probably not that good. But

(33:01):
if the contrast is really good, then you can start
to see these details, all of those shades of black. Yeah,
from deepest darkest black to just you know, my daily despair. Yeah. Well,
I have a question about aspect ratio. Are all the
televisions that are being made today pretty much the same
in terms of how they're physically framing the screen. Because

(33:24):
those old blocky TVs, you know, your your CRT TV,
your monitor had that that old four by three framing.
And if you watch any movie made in wide screen,
as most good movies are, they'd have this letterboxing format
and have black bars on the top and the bottom,
and then you've got your uncles saying, how do you
get rid of them black bars on the screen. But

(33:47):
it seems like most TVs I see these days are
in the wide screen format. Are there any differences in
how they frame the screen? Yes? Actually, so there's the
sixteen by nine is the standard. Uh so sixteen by
nine standard definition because there are standard definition channels that
will um broadcast in sixteen by nine. It's interesting because

(34:08):
they they stitched together two four by threes, uh to
make that properly, properly, there's actually a split, not that
it's perceptible, but that's the way behind the scenes that's
working now. The sixteen by nine. The interesting thing there
is it still not quite the aspect ratio that we

(34:29):
get with feature films. So when we watch a feature
film on on a wide screen television. Either there still
needs to be a little bit of letterboxing, maybe not
so much that you would really notice, might just be
a tiny sliver at the top and bottom, or you're
getting some of the image cut off. Um. I don't
know if you guys ever had to watch a pan

(34:50):
and scan version of a film. Oh, those are the worst.
Those are literally the worst. Yeah. I remember the old
version of Halloween that is turned into a pan and scan,
the Mike Myers John Carpenter movie. Yeah, I think, well
I think it was Halloween. I'm pretty sure it was.
It could have been another movie. But anyway, what I
remember is there are musical stings timed to when you

(35:13):
see the shadow of the killer pass into the frame
of the camera. But in the in the standard version
that you could get on your VHS tape, you didn't
see the shadow, so there just suddenly be a sting
and nothing happened. Yeah, I saw. I remember the same
thing with a lot of my favorite movies, like uh,
there were a lot of of I'm a huge musical fan.

(35:36):
There were a lot of big musicals that were made
that use like super wide screen format, like the pan
of vision type stuff, which was particularly awful for pan
and scan because you would have uh they would frame
it so that you would have two major characters on screen,
but there'd be a third character in the scene who
you'd hear but never see because they had to figure
out where are they going to put the focus digitally

(35:58):
after the fact. Uh. Well, the sixteen by nine means
that we don't need to worry about that as much.
It's still, like I said, not quite the ratio that
we get with feature films these days, but it's way
closer than four by three. So obviously that is really important.
I don't know of anyone who's making a television set
that's not sixteen by nine. Um, is that the next

(36:20):
retro craze. It's like you've got people into vinyl, You've
got people into four by three TVs. Well, there there
are displays that aren't that do not conform to sixteen
by nine, but they're displays, not TVs, so there's a
there's a difference there. Display is meant to show specific
proprietary content made for that display, as opposed to a

(36:42):
general purpose device that's going to bring in all sorts
of content from various places. Uh So, there are some
other like I alluded to some challenges when it comes
to making content for these types of displays, these types
of television's. Uh, you know, we talked about how it
is a boon for storytellers because now they know that

(37:04):
the work they put into telling this tale with visual,
astounding imagery can actually be consumed properly. But it also
means that any you know, scuffs and scrapes and maybe
subpar costuming choices can be seen much more easily too,

(37:28):
shiny foreheads, for example. This is something that actually we
sitting around this table are are relatively familiar with because uh,
they shoot here in the office on four K cameras. Yeah,
and so I've got powder in my backpack, I've got makeup.
I'm not ashamed to say it. You know, this was
a thing that came up, not not with resolution as

(37:51):
far as I recall, but with frame rate. About when
the first Hobbit movie was released and it was showed
at the advanced frame rate. I can't remember how many
frames per second, and so that was a different issue,
but it was another way of seeing a more realistic
version of what happened in front of the camera. And
I remember lots of reviewers I never saw it in

(38:13):
frames per second, but I remember lots of reviewers complaining
and what they were saying the movie. For some reason,
this way of filming the movie and and playing it
back makes everything look fake. The props look like props,
the costumes look like costumes. It looks like a community
theater production. I I've heard it called the Mexican soap

(38:37):
opera effect. That's really what I've heard it as. But
when I saw it, the thing I thought was, it
feels like I'm really there, not in Middle Earth, but
on a movie set. Yeah, it makes me feel like
I'm actually And that's one of the things about these
these ultra high definition televisions too, is that it can
feel like you're looking through a window. One of the
scenes that I saw was just simply a tree out

(39:00):
in the field, and it looks like you're looking through
a window at an actual tree. It does not, I mean,
it's it's very close to giving it depth to the
point where it's it's not three D, but the clarity
is so amazing that you're getting almost an illusion of
depth just from the clarity, which is pretty phenomenal because
you know, three D did not take off the way

(39:21):
television manufacturers really hoping it would. And you also bring
up something else that I should have mentioned with the
other elements that are important with your television, which is
refresh rate. So refresh rate that's how how often that
screen is refreshed every second. And so you find a
lot that are in one two hurts these days, and uh,

(39:43):
those TVs are supposed to reduce motion blur, but it
also can kind of give this sort of surreal effect
to certain types of content. It's great for things like sports.
I mean, it looks amazing, but it can almost look
like a like a video game. To me personally, it
looks like something digital when it was when it was practical,
when it was three dimensional people hanging out. Yeah, it's

(40:05):
confirmed a lot of my suspicions about certain Hollywood personalities
that I've thought were digital. Uh, now it's exactly right.
And some people have just said, well, this is just
the way things are going to change, and it's just like,
you know, I just have to get used to it. Yeah,
it's just one of those things where we're in a
transition transition right now. It's just as when film went
from black and white to color or sound was first incorporated.

(40:27):
These were moments of transition, and if you live through them,
they seem very odd. But if you are from the
generation where that has now become the standard, that's just
that's the normal thing, and everything before it just looks weird.
So we just happened to be living through that transition.
You know, I wonder at what point resolution stops mattering? Like,

(40:49):
at what point is the resolution of a TV screen
so good that it really is no different than looking
at the same thing without a camera and and a
digital medium in queen And Yeah, so you know, kind
of along the lines of what I was saying earlier,
like like, are we in the future going to have
like thirty two K televisions? Right? Will it be an

(41:09):
appreciable difference for our eyeballs? Because you've had people who
have said that they looked at two cave versus four K,
or four cave versus eight K, and they say, I
can't really detect a difference. Uh, this is dependent upon
lots of factors, the ones that we've mentioned before. So
there's not a simple answer, right, I can't tell you
that at sixteen K we will reach pixel saturation where

(41:34):
it won't matter if we add anymore because that's too
simple an answer. It's actually a little more complicated than that.
One thing we need to remember is that the resolution
also depends upon the pixel density, so the pixel size
and the pixel density, and that again depends upon not
just the resolution but the screen size. So pixel density

(41:54):
of a forty in ultra high definition TV is greater
than an eight inch all for high definition TV because
the eight inches larger, so the pixels are spread out
a little more, they're less dense. So we talk about
density by p p I or pixels per inch. Uh.
And if you are looking at various products on the

(42:16):
on the market, you're gonna see a lot of variation here,
and again it's all gonna depend upon the size of
the screen and its resolution. Offset printing is three hundred
dots per inch, so dots would be the equivalent of
pixels in this sense. The dots are the individual elements
that make up a printed image. Pixels would be a
displayed image on a television. Uh So if offset printing

(42:40):
requires three hundred dots per inch to be considered, uh,
you know that that's the standard. Yeah, it's good. It's
gonna be a good clarity. What would be a good
one for displays. Well, the iPhone six plus has a
resolution of four hundred and one pixels per inch. Difference. Yeah, well,

(43:00):
it's just just the way it works out. It's resolution,
but four hundred and one pixels per inch, and of
course you're holding that at between ten and twenty inches
away from your face. Ideally you don't have it right
up on your eyeballs, but you also don't have it
across the room. So you can't just say, well, four
d one pixels per inch because that all depends upon again,

(43:21):
how far away you are. So pixel density will depend
upon the resolution the size of the screen. So a
sixty five inch Ultra high definition television will have a
p p I of about sixty seven point seven eight.
And you're thinking, whoa, the iPhone six plus is at
four and one and a a u h D television

(43:41):
is at sixty seven point seven eight. But you are
not standing I hope ten to twenty inches away from
that sixty five inch television. Your your several feet further back,
and so that density matters less because of the viewing distance.
So you have to take into account the pixel density,
the size of the screen, how far away you are,

(44:03):
the size of the screen will determine the pixel density,
but that also determines how far away you're gonna sit. Right,
you're gonna sit further away, presumably from an enormous screen
than you would from a smaller screen. You know, I
wonder if it's always going to remain a thing that
we like to sit across the room from a screen
we're watching, because that's sort of the standard with television,

(44:25):
and I think it it comes from movie theaters and
from times when a household might have one television. But
more and more I'm noticing in myself and and the
way other people do things. We're watching things on devices
that are right in front of our faces. A greater
percentage all the time of the stuff we watched is
viewed individually. And of course I still watch stuff on

(44:48):
a screen across the room on TV, like with my
wife Rachel, when we're watching something together, and that's kind
of social. But I wonder if we'd reached the point where, well,
maybe we just sitting next to each other and both
watch it on a device at the same time, you know,
I I don't know. I don't know what the future
holds for that, but that sounds kind of silly to

(45:10):
us now, But would it be silly in the same
way that if you told somebody from the nineteen eighties
that everybody would have their own individual telephone that they
would have for themselves and not share with the house.
I think it also depends upon the content you're watching
and the experience you want to have. For example, if
I'm watching a big spectacle film, I generally want it

(45:33):
on my bigger screen TV. I want to have that
experience of seeing those big moments and being caught up
in that and and uh, it's a little harder for
me to appreciate on a smaller screen. Now. That also
could be a generational thing. But there are there's plenty
of content I like to watch on a small screen,
but it doesn't tend to be the spectacle type stuff

(45:54):
or the stuff where there's a lot of uh like
complex cinematography. Uh. That being said, one of the things
I read about was that if you hit about five
hundred pixels per inch on a distance of about twenty inches,
that's pretty much the limit for the average person's ability
to differentiate the quality of the image. Like anything more

(46:17):
than that would be a waste because you wouldn't be
able to perceive it. So the equivalent of five hundred
pixels per inch at whatever distance you are from the
screen would be that would be the same limit. But
that's the problem is that it depends upon how far
away you are, right, So if you're six ft away
as opposed to twenty inches, you don't need five hundred

(46:38):
pixels per inch. It may be significantly lower than that.
And once you reach that level for whatever distance you're at,
there's no need to go higher. Not that that won't
stop manufacturers. I imagine they will continue to do it,
but um, but at that point you you will literally
be unable to perceive the distance the difference, right, not

(46:59):
the distance, but the difference in the two. UM. I
don't know. Maybe maybe other kinds of technologies will fall
more into focus as the U as U as the
pixel issue has kind of worked out, Maybe the color
issue or contrast or frame rate frame rate will become

(47:21):
the new big things. Yeah, no, I'm sure those will
all be elements of it. I mean, obviously the three
D didn't really take off, and I can understand why.
I mean, I don't want to have yet another thing
to keep up with, just to watch television, nor do
I think all of TV benefits from that depth. I
don't really want to watch like Orange, just The New
Black and three D. You have any desire to do that, Yeah,

(47:41):
there's I guess they're idiots like me who don't want
to watch anything. Actually, I'm okay if the three If
the three D was built in as part of the
storytelling from the beginning and it and it provides a
useful element to the story, Uh, then I'm fine. It's
the same thing. Like I could say, I've in joyed
plays that have had minimal sets, but I've also enjoyed

(48:04):
plays that I have had incredibly complex sets. And to
me understand what you're saying, Yeah, but maybe you just
haven't experienced the right film yet. That's always possible. To
be fair, I do not go see films in three D. Yeah,
I just haven't met the right three D yet. But
either way, I definitely wouldn't want to have to keep

(48:27):
up with I mean, it's hard enough for me to
keep up with a single remote in my house and
I only have one because I've got one smart remote
that controls everything, and yet it's never where I thought
it was. Uh, and uh, I'm sure there's a gremlin
that just moves the remote when we're not home, But
I would hate to think like Becca's never home when

(48:48):
I'm not home, it's me I break into his house
to mess with his head. Should have given you that key?
Uh yeah, So this is um. I don't think three
D will ever really hit like saturation in the in
the consumer market. But but that's the sort of stuff
we'll see once we hit the saturation resolution where you
really can't go any higher and have it make a

(49:09):
meaningful difference. There's going to have to be something else,
you know. I wondered before we came in whether there
would ever be a trend back to any kind of
analog way of receiving visual media, so so closer to
a film experience and not a digital television experience, right,

(49:30):
because you can look at projected film that way. So
it's you know, you've you've captured the images on film
through through shining the light on a photoreactive surface, and
then you just shine light back through a copy of that,
and it's all sort of an analog to analog experience basically, right.
I I kind of hope so, because I I really

(49:52):
enjoy projection in a in a home sense, it's a
lot more difficult to set up because you have to
create the screen and the uh, the setup. But right, yeah,
it's it's something that I feel like I like better.
But I'm not sure if I would actually be able
to tell the difference. I can't be positive it's not
just some kind of like idea based preference. Well, if

(50:14):
we ever get to a world where film projection is
just completely abandoned, that means we don't get any more
Quentin Tarantino movies because he refuses to shoot on digital. Yeah,
and he doesn't like digital conversion. I I do. I
blame Quentin Tarantino for for a lot of things that
he says and does. But but but I really agree
with him on on that one. I still personally have

(50:35):
a very nostalgic concept of a film versus digital. Yeah.
I do love I mean, I do love film, I
really do. I also appreciate digital projection as well, but
I can see the benefits and the and the pros
and cons of both. The thing the other thing we
talked about, Joe was just the idea of could there
be some other technology that eventually supplants the way where

(50:59):
you using display technology right now, something beyond the pixel
approach to displaying images, And we don't know of any
I haven't found any examples of anything like that, though
there may be something out there I don't know about.
If you if you've ever heard of a future analog
or even just you know, any non pixel based display

(51:21):
technology that that could be coming in the future, we'd
love to hear about it. Yeah. The uh, the way
I look at is that I think pixel based technology
is going to be around for the near future, but
who knows, Maybe in twenty years will be looking back
and saying, well, this antiquated way that we were, you know,
displaying technology, and now that we have this amazing color

(51:42):
morph screen technology, why would anyone have ever used pixels? Yeah,
the screen itself is able to create the images and
there's nothing else that's you know whatever, we know, we
don't know. There's no way of us to know. And Joe,
you made a very good point when we had this
discussion earlier, pointing out that if the technology we're using
today continues to be reliable and cheap, then it's gonna

(52:05):
stick around for a really long time, even if we
come up with alternatives. Oh yeah, Like it will take
a while for anyone to adopt a news standard considering
that this one is so well established. Yeah. I mean,
if you can have screens that are they just look
fantastic and they're pretty cheap, and they're they're using technology
we already have, it's gonna be hard for something to

(52:27):
upset that system. Even if you can make the case
then no, it really does capture more the nuance of light,
and you know, it's it's more like actually looking through
a window. It only costs five thousand dollars more. Maybe
it'll just be a window and and actors will come
in and act behind the window and we call it TV. Ah.

(52:49):
I mean that would explain I think that once we
get like cloning like end and rapid aging under underway.
I was just thinking that totally would explain why Crispin
Glovers hiding out in the closet in my house. That
would that would be a good reason. It would make
it a lot easier for me to go to sleep
at night, if that's actually the real reason. Anyway. Uh. Yeah,
the biggest and most high resolution television that I saw

(53:12):
while I was at c e S was at eight KO. Yeah,
what did that look like pretty? It's pretty? Ya, I mean,
is is enormous. I can't imagine like my house went
hold on. Sorry to interrupt you, but what did you
watch on it? Was it one of those beauty I
I candy reels or yeah, what I would want to

(53:34):
see on it is an old VHS tape from TV
of an episode of night Rider. I'll look at the
tracking marks on this. It's amazing the high resolution of
of how badly this thing was out of out of whack.
If you can't make night Rider taped off TV look good,
what can you do? I don't you know, they're not
miracle workers. The future again is night Rider. I'm just

(53:57):
having the voice of Kit going through my head. Um. Also,
the he was John Adams in seventeen seventy six. It's
not exactly the same. Yeah, also appeared as a car
very weird anyway. So yeah, that wraps up this discussion
about Congress my goal. Yeah it was weird. Um So yeah, guys,

(54:21):
that wraps up this kind of discussion about the future
of resolution and televisions and what we are looking at
in the near term. I'm interested to hear what you
guys think about this. Do you think that two K,
four K, eight K. Do you think all of that
has actual payoff? Do you think of it as being like?
Are are you incapable of perceiving a change in the quality?

(54:44):
I used to be that way, but now I really
can At least I can tell the difference between HD
and four K. I could certainly tell that difference um
with the larger screens between four K and eight K,
I can tell a difference uh smaller screen four K
versus large screen a K harder for me to tell
the difference, But my visual visual acuity may not be

(55:06):
as good as yours. So curiously here If you guys
have had any experience with that, what you think about it,
or if you have any other questions or comments, you
can write to us. Our email just is FW Thinking
at how Stuff Works dot com and we've had a
lot of people right in and we're really thankful for
that and we want more, so please keep sending us messages.

(55:27):
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(55:49):
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