re: Would you buy a 4K TV?

P-series 4k are really cheap for what they are. They just had a Groupon with the 50" for $599. Now there are probably some places where that TV lacks, but I'm not overly tech savvy to know.

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I tried the same thing in a previous thread.

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Now I remember him. The "industry expert."

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If it looks better, I don't see how it's due to the upscaling.

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I agree that most of the perceived differences are likely attributable to improvements to the display itself--viewing angles, contrast ratio, color depth, etc. For example, I have a 55-inch 1080p LCD TV with no bells or whistles. It's old and fairly basic. CCFL backlit AU Optronics panel, 120hz crappy ClearFrame motion enhancement, etc. I paid like $1,000 for it back in the day. If I put $1,000 toward a 55" 1080P TV today, it's going to be a hell of a lot better than my current one. If I drop $2,000 on a 4K panel, I'm bound to be equally blown away, because after all, my best direct comparative reference is an old panel that you probably wouldn't even find in a Walmart Black Friday TV these days. I have a couple of small 720P panels that are even older. I suspect a lot of people will be comparing their new TVs similarly -- Unless I'm totally out of touch with today's TV market, I can't imagine people are replacing their living room TVs every year or two.

On the subject of upscaling, it can help a little, but it's mostly an eye trick (like the interpolated frames when you enable ClearFrame or MotionPlus or whatever your TV calls it). It obviously doesn't add information that isn't there, nor does it make the image sharper (it, in fact, does the opposite). I found an article on rtings.com that shows a photographic comparison between a 1080p image on a 1080p panel and that same 1080p image upscaled to a 4K screen. I cropped a chunk out of each image (full zoom) so you can see the individual pixels:

1080P image, native 1080P
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1080P image, upscaled on 4K screen


Native is a lot sharper, while the upscaled version is smoother. Mostly, the upscaling seems to prevent the pronounced jaggedness and artifacting you'd see in the blown up picture. It's similar to antialiasing, but not as intelligent (hardware-based antialiasing actually samples individual pixels and aggregates color values for a perceptibly "smoother" transition between starkly different colored objects/pixels, and some forms of AA will render in-game textures at a higher resolution and downsample them). TVs don't have that kind of processing power nor does it have access to a higher-res version of the media it's displaying, so the upscaling is really just interpolation. It provides a similar result but with reduced sharpness. From a proper distance it can look a little better than native 1080P, but I would agree with what the article says about it being totally subjective.

Also, as I mentioned in my last post, HD streams are compressed. Sitting at a close enough view distance where you can actually notice a difference between, say, 1080p and 720P, you would likely notice that a blu-ray looks better than a Netflix 1080p stream. Sit that same distance from a same-sized 4K panel, and a compressed 4K stream from Netflix may indeed look better than the 1080P netflix stream, because of the higher bitrate, and for that same reason you might even notice increased quality in a 4K stream downscaled on a 1080P panel. You're seeing more detail and less noise. Even HD broadcasts are compressed. Compression really is a huge issue across the board, even with 1080P TVs. But again, view distance is key here.

I'm not trying to say don't buy a 4K TV whatsoever, though. One of the main reasons to buy them has little to do with the resolution and more to do with the fact that TV companies are putting the most-improved panel technology in their flagship products, and their flagship products are now 4K televisions. 1080P and 4K units are quickly diverging to bargain bin vs. premium when it comes to panel technology, OLED being the exception thus far.

But, the idea of buying a 4K TV for "futureproofing" seems silly to me. 1080P TVs have been around for how long, at least 10 years? Blu-Ray started gaining real traction about 3 years later. Netflix started pushing 1080P content in 2013, right? We aren't holding our breath for broadcast TV to improve anytime soon, so unless you just have a massive blu-ray collection or a hard drive of high-bitrate video files that comprise a huge chunk of your TV time, the majority of our casual content viewing, today in 2015, is compressed 1080P media at best (and that's assuming you're a cable cutter and aren't spending most of your viewing time watching compressed and upscaled 720P broadcast).

We're going to see more 4K content this year, and the next, and so on, but think about where we are with 1080P content today and how long it took to get to this point. The 55" 1080P LCD panel in my living room is less than 5 years old, and today's TVs shite all over it. Futureproofing does not work in consumer technology.