As technology moves forward we see new displays and video standards being integrated.
I remember vividly walking in the town centre of my university town and seeing the first full HD screen in the window of Curries and being blown away by the quality. Up until this point I had been of the opinion that surely no one needs a clearer picture than “normal TV” but here we are 7 years later and 50% of the market now have the ability to receive and watch full 1080p video and TV. (this is just people who are receiving HD signals through either their satellite or free-view receiver, not on how many people actually have HD sets).The question on everyone’s lips is are we going to see a similar public hunger for 4K infrastructure.
Yes, the video we can achieve with these new bits of kit is incredible and the costs of producing in ever higher resolution are falling. However, can the “Average Joe” see this?
I’m going to talk about the UK market here as this is where we operate, other places have different constraints that have other impacts on what I will discuss.
Now here we have a very nifty chart showing screen size vs viewable resolution (based upon 20:20 vision)
Ref Carton Bale
Starting to get it? In our little houses that we have in the UK with the best eyes that we could be given, it’s pretty hard to appreciate full 4k resolutions on the screen sizes we buy. For me, the jury is still out, we will embrace the newer technologies as we always do (the more pixels the better for us!) but will the market adopt it, or will it become another 3D elephant in the room. Only time will tell…