The Problems of Going Beyond 4K

The visual quality of the movies we watch has always been a concern. Lower quality doesn’t just mean missing out on film details, it can involve missing the intent of a film’s original artistic vision. With the new standard of 4K, visual fidelity has reached a level that previous generations never could have dreamed of. The constant march of technology leaves us with some burning questions, however, about what further progress in quality will imply. What are the benefits of going beyond 4K, what are the downsides, and what’s likely to occur given the trajectory of the movie market?

Measuring Fidelity

For anyone unaware, the term 4K is shorthand used to refer to the resolution of the still images which, when combined, make up a movie. Each image consists of tiny squares called pixels, and the higher the number of pixels, the more detailed an image can appear. A 4K image contains 3840 x 2160 pixels, a big step up from the previous 1080p standard of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Doubling both horizontal and vertical space means a 4K screen has 4x the pixels of a 1080p display.

For most users with good eyesight, 4K does appear crisper than 1080p as a result of more detail. Whether or not all those extra pixels matter, that’s another question entirely. Some people might not notice the extra detail of 4K to 8K at all, as the leap from 1080p to 4K is far less obvious than the progress seen in prior generations. Going from 4K to the next-gen of 8K brings diminishing returns even further, and that’s a development we need to take seriously.

Do More Pixels Equal a Better Experience?

There are many components to this question, and what the human eye can detect is just the beginning. For an illustration of the limits of extra pixels, gaming has been an area that illustrates the problem perfectly. Tests performed by tech website LTT demonstrated that even professionals struggled to see the difference between 4K and 8k, meaning most of us might never be able to tell at all.

We also need to factor in that higher resolutions beyond a certain point do not affect the quality of an experience. Consider online casino games, and what makes the experience visually engaging. The best online pokies do look great, but raw fidelity is only a part of this. Style can be just as important, as can special bonuses outside the game like deposit matches and free spins. Services like WinAWin and WILDZ work because they understand there’s more than just the latest 8K standard of looks when it comes to offering users what they want.

Higher pixel counts can also mean overturning the original visions of older films which were created with an understanding of the technology of the time. You might be able to watch old western films like The Complete Sartana collection upscaled to 4K or 8K, but the filmmakers never considered this as a way audiences would watch. Like turning on motion smoothing, higher resolutions can betray the feeling a movie worked so hard to accomplish.

Hardware Realities

Going beyond 8K can also create issues when it comes to storage and playback. The higher resolution of a movie file, the larger it will be. If you collected physical disks, then storage might not be an issue, but for those with storage drives, high-resolution uncompressed movies present a real problem.

Common video sizes today sit in the 1080p to 4K range, where an hour of video will cost 1.4 gigabytes to 22 gigabytes respectively. With 8k video, a mere one hour of video can take up 38 gigabytes for just one hour of footage. For reference, a two-terabyte storage drive could store around 1,400 hours of 1080p movies in this space, 4K could handle 90 hours, and 8K could store a mere 52.

The higher the resolution of a movie, the more processing power it can take to play back properly. 8K could then imply the need for a media server upgrade, and a faster smart TV. Additionally, more data for 8K would also require more bandwidth to stream, requiring higher speeds and causing problems for those on lower monthly internet data allotments.

Source: Pexels

Whether you prefer older releases like those in the Criterion Collection or the cutting-edge new hotness, the conclusion over 8K appears to be the same. Simply put, unless you own an enormous 8K projector and are massively invested as a viewer, it’s not worth the upgrade. That’s not to say you should actively avoid 8K, but it’s certainly not a standard worth fully upgrading an entire setup to attain. Of course, we’d expect television and media companies to advertise it as a must anyway, but for the sake of your wallet, consider taking their advertising claims with more than a pinch of salt.