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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

That's like asking "feeding yourself is now somehow a negative" when people talk about obesity.

It's not always a naive "the more the better" issue.

Too much resolution can result in unnatural and distracting results -- your eyes don't have that much resolution as when you see a person in 8K in a extreme closeup. It's neither natural not flattering to see an actors individual skin pores, for example.

Similarly, faster frame-rates capture motion more accurately (sharper under motion), but result in a movie that looks distracting and soap-opera-ish to the viewers eyes.

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> Too much resolution can result in unnatural and distracting results -- your eyes don't have that much resolution as when you see a person in 8K in a extreme closeup. It's neither natural not flattering to see an actors individual skin pores, for example.

Your eyes can't see human faces 8 feet tall either but no one seems to think that movies are better on 20 inch screens. To the extent that movies look unnatural in extremely high resolution, that's an issue where directors need to learn to use the medium effectively. It's certainly not more natural to see blur or pixelation instead of pores.

> faster frame-rates capture motion more accurately (sharper under motion), but result in a movie that looks distracting and soap-opera-ish to the viewers eyes.

Only because we've been trained to expect films to be a juddery 24 fps experience. If high frame rates become commonplace they'll look commonplace.

>your eyes don't have that much resolution as when you see a person in 8K in a extreme closeup.

If I move close enough to your face that it fills my entire vision I can see it in glorious 16k, skin pores and all. It's the extreme close up that's unnatural, not the fact that you can see details in extreme close ups.

As with 3d, most directors are lagging behind in adapting their style to changes in the medium. Some things that were developed for low-fidelity grainy film don't work in 8k. Some fight scenes that look good at 24hz look garbage at 60hz. But on the other hand 60hz and 8k allow for speed and details that just produce blurs on old 24hz mediums.

I don't follow. Even looking painfully close to my retina displays the picture still looks great. There is no point where suddenly skin pores become noticeable when they weren't previously. If you see skin pores in a movie then that's the fault of the makeup department--I recall reading early HDTV productions struggled with this.

Rather, I think the reason why theatres don't benefit from 8k is that from a certain distance increased resolution doesn't have a benefit. E.g. If you ever get close to a billboard you may notice that the resolution of the ad is quite poor, but from street level it looks perfectly fine. We aren sitting much farther than 10' from the theatre screen, so more resolution won't be noticeable given the distance from the screen for most of the audience.

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