Perfect Visibility
8K TV is a joke. But that means it also points to the fact a 4K TV is likely to be the longest lasting television purchase you'll make since the cathode ray era.
OK, this headline could apply very well to crisis discussions today. We need as much visibility as possible of that invisible virus in order to corner it and starve it of opportunity.
Iāll link to one of the best discussions on the question of contact tracing apps below. We canāt let the government just say ātrust usā on this stuff. An app could help in the coronavirus endgame. But it could also be a farce and a deeply troubling civil liberty intrusion if itās not designed and managed appropriately. And this government doesnāt have a good track record with running tech properlyā¦
Instead, Iām going to just divert our minds and talk consumer technology this week and give you my favourite rant of recent years.
8K TV is a joke. Donāt buy it.
But hereās the positive and exciting corollary to this idea:
A 4K TV is likely to be the longest lasting television purchase youāll make since the cathode ray era.
Thereās two reasons 8K is just the TV industry desperately trying to give us another reason to buy another TV upgrade and not āthe next amazing thingā in our viewing experience.
One: the maths on the optimal viewing distance to an 8K TV is 0.75x the width of the screen. If you have a 60-inch TV - pretty sizeable - that means your seating position should be exactly one metre from the screen. Thatās incredibly close.
For 4K, optimal is double that. Two metres. For HD screens, itās four metres. That window between 2-4M is the zone where 4K is our ideal picture quality and a good match for the typical home.
Two: OK, letās just say TVs jump up to a typical wall dominating scale of 100-inches. And suddenly optimal viewing is 165cm for 8K and you live in a small apartment where thatās about the distance from you to the screen anywayā¦ what are you going to watch on it at 8K resolution?
When 4K arrived I was told by film studio experts that they were now mastering and restoring older films at 5K resolution as a nice archive resolution that gets the best from film reels scanned into digital and suits cinema projection as well as then scaling to 4K for home.
Maybe theyāre shifting gears again. But unless youāre planning on buying all your movies on some fancy new disc format that can handle the storage capacity required for 8K filmsā¦
4K is coming into its own as broadband gets better and Blu-ray now widely supports it too. The latest 4K TVs now have all the superior bells and whistles that are more important than resolution too. The latest Dolby Atmos features and High Dynamic Range and improved colour depth and contrast ratios.
4K as a screen you can buy is now optimised beautifully. Itās ready to be our new long term format for stable, wonderful home TV.
If you keep worrying about waiting because the next fancy thing might launch soon, Iām saying itās already here. Let yourself have it.
Even if 8K content arrives tomorrow, 4K is optimal for almost every home. If we move into a new era where our TV becomes a stand up touchscreen experience and weāre viewing at arms length the majority of the time then, yes, 8K will have a purpose.
Next month is the typical month when TV makers launch their latest models. As they start pushing 8K as the āflagshipā, 4K TVs are going to drop in price and create the perfect era for screens that wonāt ever feel outdated - theyāll last as long as their build quality allows.
And right now, having a nice television feels like a worthy investment in household happiness.
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This TV is particularly amazing. And itās around $2600 at JB Hi-Fi. Fairly expensive compared to some but this is in the ābest you can getā territory right now, which makes that price pretty solid. Thereās great 4K TVs around $1500 too.
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