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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

Amen. Like about 50% of the population, I wear glasses. I absolutely can't make any noticeable difference between 2K and 4K at normal viewing distance. Most cinemas nowadays are 2K only, and nobody cares. Because most people older than 40 simply can't see.

Heck, for 10 years I've seen people watching 4:3 TV on 16:9 screens, horribly stretched. People are almost blind, seriously. They'd tolerate about anything.

HFR and HDR on the other hand, are great. I've seen HDR/HFR demos in 2K at Amsterdam IBC and it looks much better (much more realistic) than standard 4K.

8K? The NHK makes 8K demos, and they can only show almost still images, else you only have extremely detailed motion blur at ordinary framerates. They even give you a magnifying glass to look at their 8K screen. That's impressive, but I don't plan watching movies through big lenses to catch the details, anyway. What's the point, apart from planned obsolescence?

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Oh man, the 4:3 stretching. Whenever I reach for the remote to correct it, people go "stop messing with the TV! It's fine!" and then go "it's stretched now, it was fine before!" when I fix the aspect ratio.

That and "smooth motion" frame interpolation. I don't know how people can stand it.

Oh, when I was visiting my father for Christmas, he had a new TV with Live Football Mode, which is just a fancy name for upping the contrast, saturation, and making it look 'smoother' doing what you mentioned. During sports it's actually fine, but he turned it on during a different tv show or movie and it looked horrible, like it was turning the tv show into a soap opera. It has its place, but in general I trust the designers of these shows, networks, manufacturers, and everyone in between to know what they're doing more than me and besides changing a dull looking picture due to something like a different colored light (contrast, warmth/coolness, saturation settings) I wouldn't mess with other settings.

That's a big peeve I have as well. The photographer/videographer/musician/artist has spent many hours getting things just right, and my equipment decides to pump everything up to 11? It's an insult to the creator.

I'm so glad to know I'm not the only person that is driven crazy by this. It's hard to put a finger on why it bothers me, but to me it makes everything look "amateurish" and I find that so distracting.

If the glasses are the correct one for you, you should have normal eyesight (that's the point of glasses).

It's also almost never 100% true. Even if the glasses are perfect, they also have to be perfectly clean or you get a bit of a blur anyway. Small enough to not be noticeable, but strong enough to blur the benefits of such a higher resolution.

Actually, no. There is no available correction that would allow me to read the smallest letters on the optician's test board. Age, floaters, coming presbyopia combining with aggravating myopia, uncorrectable changing astigmatism, etc. You're probably too young to understand :)

TVs just keep getting bigger while viewing distances stay basically the same. With 8K it would be possible to have an IMAX home theater experience with the display completely filling your peripheral vision.

>Most cinemas nowadays are 2K only, and nobody cares

I care very much. The Force Awakens was in 2k and looked like a gameboy game. And just about everything else unless I'm sitting right at the back.

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