Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you today? I thought we would talk a bit
Speaker 1: about resolutions. Not like I'm gonna lose weight this year,
Speaker 1: I promise, but more like, yeah, I got a five
Speaker 1: K ultra wide display, so you know, I'm pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Resolution is one of the factors that determines the quality
Speaker 1: of image you can have on a display, whether that's
Speaker 1: a television or a computer display. We're largely going to
Speaker 1: talk about TVs in this episode. And remember I said
Speaker 1: one of the factors, because there's actually a ton of
Speaker 1: different factors that come into play when it's all about
Speaker 1: your image quality. I think that's important because often, I
Speaker 1: guess less often than it used to be. But you know,
Speaker 1: it used to be a thing where people would use
Speaker 1: resolution as a as shorthand for quality, right, Like they
Speaker 1: would talk about resolution as if that automatically made one
Speaker 1: display or television better than another. And there's this implication
Speaker 1: that the larger the number, the better the experience. It
Speaker 1: is kind of like how Nigel Toughnel of a spinal
Speaker 1: tap insisted that his amp was superior to all other
Speaker 1: amps on the market because his goes to eleven and
Speaker 1: eleven is one louder than ten. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: there are lots of elements that determine whether or not
Speaker 1: the image you get on screen is fantastic or if
Speaker 1: it's not, And we'll talk a bit about that at
Speaker 1: the end, but for now, let's just focus on resolution,
Speaker 1: no pun intended. Typically we describe resolution as think of
Speaker 1: it as the number of pixels that are used to
Speaker 1: make up an image, so pixels in this case would
Speaker 1: be individual points of light. This is a lot easier
Speaker 1: to talk about with digital displays. When you get to
Speaker 1: analog it's a very different story. We'll touch on that.
Speaker 1: So there have been a lot of different display technologies
Speaker 1: over the years, and they work in different ways, but
Speaker 1: we frequently will still talk about resolution in terms of pixels.
Speaker 1: It's just a useful kind of shorthand. Now it's undeniably
Speaker 1: true that if you only have a few pixels, any
Speaker 1: image you create is going to be crude and blocky. Really,
Speaker 1: you'll be able to pick out the shapes of the
Speaker 1: individual pixels. So a lot of the discussion we're going
Speaker 1: to have today is going to be about square pixels.
Speaker 1: And thus, if you make an image with just a
Speaker 1: few pixels and they're all square pixels, it's going to
Speaker 1: look like a bunch of blocks. If you've ever played
Speaker 1: old home video games, like the stuff you would get
Speaker 1: on say an Atari twenty six hundred or the old
Speaker 1: Nintendo Entertainment System, you probably noticed that stuff on screen
Speaker 1: typically is made up of squares. Some of the squares
Speaker 1: could be pretty small, but they're still squares, and they
Speaker 1: have defined edges. If you get a good enough look,
Speaker 1: you can see, oh, these are a bunch of blocks.
Speaker 1: Even rounded characters like the Goombas in the original Super
Speaker 1: Mario Brothers game on the nes, they're made up of
Speaker 1: these tiny little blocks, and pixels are essentially the same
Speaker 1: basic idea, although pixels are really the elements that are
Speaker 1: allowing us to see those blocks. So if I gave
Speaker 1: you a bunch of actual physical wooden blocks, and the
Speaker 1: blocks were of all different colors, like you know, you've
Speaker 1: got like a ton of red, and you've got lots
Speaker 1: of different shades of red, and a ton of blue
Speaker 1: and a ton of green, and all those kind of things.
Speaker 1: But each block measured one inch to a side, So
Speaker 1: these are these are cubes. And I give you a
Speaker 1: frame that's I don't know, like twenty one inches wide
Speaker 1: and twelve inches tall. That's roughly a four x three relationship.
Speaker 1: Not quite, but it's close enough. And I told you
Speaker 1: create a picture of a house using these blocks, Like
Speaker 1: you have to make a house using these blocks within
Speaker 1: that frame. So you're doing what is essentially a two
Speaker 1: dimensional image, Like, yeah, the blocks are cubes, but we're
Speaker 1: just gonna be looking at it from the top down. Well,
Speaker 1: your picture is gonna look pretty primitive because you're using
Speaker 1: these one inch by one inch blocks, and you know
Speaker 1: you're not gonna have any smooth curves or or things
Speaker 1: like that, like anything that's at an angle. You're gonna
Speaker 1: get this blocky texture. But let's say that instead I
Speaker 1: give you the same size frame, but now I'm giving
Speaker 1: you blocks that are half an inch to a side,
Speaker 1: not a full inch. Now you can fit more blocks
Speaker 1: inside that same frame. The house you create will look
Speaker 1: slightly less jagged, it'll look less primitive. Now let's say
Speaker 1: I keep doing that, and eventually you have blocks that
Speaker 1: are just one one hundredth of an inch to a side,
Speaker 1: and you're able to manipulate these somehow well, you could
Speaker 1: create an image that, from at least a certain distance
Speaker 1: might not look like it's jagged at all. It might
Speaker 1: look like it's made up of smooth lines no matter
Speaker 1: what the angle is, maybe even curved lines. Well, that's
Speaker 1: the basic idea behind resolution. It's a combination of pixel density,
Speaker 1: as in how many pixels are within that frame, and
Speaker 1: then the display size how big is the frame. So,
Speaker 1: going back to our example where we were starting with
Speaker 1: a frame that's twenty one inches wide and twelve inches tall,
Speaker 1: let's say we increase the frame size by a factor
Speaker 1: of ten. We might get ten times larger. But instead
Speaker 1: of adding more blocks, I also just increase the size
Speaker 1: of the blocks as well, So the pixels in this
Speaker 1: case also get to be ten times long. The resolution
Speaker 1: would be the same. Even though the image is bigger,
Speaker 1: The resolution is the same because it's the exact same
Speaker 1: number of pixels that make of that image. It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter how big I make that frame. If the pixels
Speaker 1: expand along with the frame expanding, we get the same
Speaker 1: blocky image. Now, granted, if you get further and further
Speaker 1: away from the picture, it starts to look better because
Speaker 1: we lose the fidelity with our vision. Human vision has limitations.
Speaker 1: But if I really want to make a higher resolution image,
Speaker 1: I have to change the size of the pixels. That's
Speaker 1: what's important, so I can put more pixels within that
Speaker 1: frame now, at least to a certain point. The higher
Speaker 1: the pixel density, the smoother and image will appear on
Speaker 1: a display. I say to a certain point because as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, human vision has its own limits, and
Speaker 1: beyond those limits, you are not likely to notice a difference.
Speaker 1: It's not like there's a hard cutoff for all people.
Speaker 1: Obviously everybody's different, But if you were to look at
Speaker 1: a typical person, you would say that beyond a certain resolution,
Speaker 1: if you're considering a certain size display and a certain
Speaker 1: distance from it, you're not really going to notice a
Speaker 1: difference in increase resolution. It just comes a point where
Speaker 1: a curve line is going to look perfectly curved. Now,
Speaker 1: if you were to zoom way way in, you would
Speaker 1: see that actually that curve line is made up of
Speaker 1: these little individual points, and if you go in far
Speaker 1: enough you might see, oh, these edges, there's edges to
Speaker 1: this curve. It's not perfectly curved, but only if you're
Speaker 1: zoomed way in. For our normal vision, it looks smooth,
Speaker 1: and that's that. Now, you might technically be able to
Speaker 1: cram even more pixels into that frame, but it wouldn't
Speaker 1: really make a difference in the experience. So this kind
Speaker 1: of becomes one of those if a tree falls in
Speaker 1: the woods and no one is around to hear it,
Speaker 1: does it make a sound of situations? If a manufacturer
Speaker 1: boosts resolution in a display but you're not able to
Speaker 1: perceive any difference, does it matter. I would argue that
Speaker 1: from a consumer standpoint it doesn't really matter, but the
Speaker 1: resolution tends to get tied into sales pitches and marketing
Speaker 1: and pr and from that side, it really does matter
Speaker 1: because it's a way for you to set your product
Speaker 1: apart from your competitors, because again, big numbers sound really impressive,
Speaker 1: and certain types of people just naturally want to think
Speaker 1: they're buying the best thing that's out there, even if
Speaker 1: they can't actually tell the difference between that and say,
Speaker 1: earlier or competitor models. I'm reminded of a time where
Speaker 1: I attended cees. This was years ago, and I went
Speaker 1: to a certain company's booth. I'm not going to name them,
Speaker 1: mostly because I can't really remember which booth it was,
Speaker 1: but it was one of the big ones that does television,
Speaker 1: so probably probably something like Phillips or Samsung. The company
Speaker 1: had several televisions and displays, and they had all different
Speaker 1: ranges of resolution, from some that were still in the
Speaker 1: high definition range, which we'll talk about a little bit,
Speaker 1: up to what I think was eight K. I think
Speaker 1: they had an eight K TV on there, and this
Speaker 1: was in the earliest days of eight K technology. It
Speaker 1: was kind of a prototype device, so this was before
Speaker 1: you could buy an eight K television as a consumer,
Speaker 1: and it was really just a demonstration of that technology.
Speaker 1: And the representatives in the booth had magnifying glasses and
Speaker 1: they would hand one to you and encourage you to
Speaker 1: step right on up to that screen and hold up
Speaker 1: the magnifying glass and look for pixels. And even when
Speaker 1: you did that, they were still really really hard to see,
Speaker 1: and they were saying, see, look how small our pixels are,
Speaker 1: and therefore the resolution is incredible, And yes, it was impressive,
Speaker 1: but to my eyes, when I stepped back and I
Speaker 1: just looked at the display and I compared it to
Speaker 1: lower resolution displays that were, you know, just a few
Speaker 1: feet away, some of that was virtually indistinguishable. You know,
Speaker 1: ones that were at a lower resolution didn't look that
Speaker 1: much different from the eight K display. Yes, if I
Speaker 1: got right on up to them, if I got to
Speaker 1: the point where my nose is almost touching the glass
Speaker 1: of the display, and especially if I use the magnifying glass,
Speaker 1: yes I would see pixels more clearly on the lower
Speaker 1: resolution screens than I did with the eight K. But hey, y'all,
Speaker 1: I don't watch TV that way. I'm usually quite a
Speaker 1: few feet back from the screen, and I rarely ever
Speaker 1: whip out my magnifying glass while I'm watching, you know,
Speaker 1: shmigadoon or whatever that being said. As I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: if you are a manufacturer and you decide, hey, I'm
Speaker 1: going to create the largest consumer television that's been introduced
Speaker 1: so far, resolution is going to matter in that case
Speaker 1: because the bigger the display you go with, the higher
Speaker 1: resolution you're going to need in order to get that
Speaker 1: smooth experience with your image quality unless people are just
Speaker 1: looking at the display from really far away. Because you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at a huge television but you're really
Speaker 1: far away. It's kind of the same thing as looking
Speaker 1: at a medium sized television, but you're closer. I know
Speaker 1: that i'm saying the obvious, but it's important for things
Speaker 1: like resolution. So if I'm shopping for a new television
Speaker 1: and I'm looking for something that's in the forty three
Speaker 1: inch range, right, like, that's the size TV I'm looking for,
Speaker 1: I probably don't need to go up to an eight
Speaker 1: K television. I'm probably not going to be able to
Speaker 1: tell the difference. But let's say I'm crazy wealthy and
Speaker 1: I want to get the equivalent of Samsung's the Wall,
Speaker 1: which I think can go up to like one hundred
Speaker 1: forty six inches. I mean, it's crazy huge. That's more
Speaker 1: than one hundred inches larger than a forty three inch
Speaker 1: TV right on the diagonal, So that's truly huge. Well,
Speaker 1: if I'm getting something that big, well I probably want
Speaker 1: the best resolution I can get because it will be
Speaker 1: noticeable if you're sitting a little close. I mean, you
Speaker 1: probably don't want to sit too close to something like
Speaker 1: that because you wouldn't be able to see everything anyway.
Speaker 1: But you get what I'm saying. So I want to
Speaker 1: higre a resolution display if it's really huge. That way,
Speaker 1: I'm not distracted by blockie images. By the way, the
Speaker 1: same thing is true for the displays on our phones.
Speaker 1: Resolution does matter on smartphones, but again, once you get
Speaker 1: to a certain pixel density, the differences become harder to spot,
Speaker 1: at least with resolution. Smartphones vary in size, but they
Speaker 1: don't get to gargantuan proportions like some televisions do. And also,
Speaker 1: the distance from which we view our smartphones tends to
Speaker 1: fall in a fairly narrow range. So I looked it up.
Speaker 1: I found the National Institute of Health actually has stats
Speaker 1: on this and says that on average, people hold their
Speaker 1: phone between teen point three centimeters to thirty two point
Speaker 1: nine centimeters or about five point two inches to just
Speaker 1: under thirteen inches away from them if they are sitting down.
Speaker 1: If you're laying down, it's different. You get the phone
Speaker 1: closer to you, probably because you don't want to be
Speaker 1: holding the phone at arm's length above you in bed
Speaker 1: or something. So if you're laying down, it tends to
Speaker 1: be between nine point nine centimeters away to twenty one
Speaker 1: point three centimeters. That's about well just under four inches
Speaker 1: to a little more than eight inches away from your face.
Speaker 1: So My point is, while companies might boast about increasing
Speaker 1: image resolution at a certain point, it just doesn't make
Speaker 1: a noticeable difference in the image quality. All Right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll
Speaker 1: have more to talk about with resolutions. All right, let's
Speaker 1: talk about some of the different resolutions that are out there.
Speaker 1: And also we should note that there there's another factor
Speaker 1: that's going to come into play in this discussion when
Speaker 1: we talk about televisions also computer displays, and that factor
Speaker 1: is called aspect ratio. This is the relationship between how
Speaker 1: tall a display is versus how wide it is. So
Speaker 1: before the nineteen nineties, with televisions, it was pretty standard
Speaker 1: for those to come in a four to three aspect ratio,
Speaker 1: meaning the display was slightly wider than it was tall,
Speaker 1: but it was, you know, fairly boxy. So it means
Speaker 1: that you would take, you.
Speaker 2: Know, let's say you have the width of this this television. Uh,
Speaker 2: if you divided the width however wide the TV was
Speaker 2: by four, whatever that number was, if you multiplied it
Speaker 2: by three, that's how tall the television was.
Speaker 1: That's the four to three, so a little wider than
Speaker 1: it is tall. Beginning in the nineteen nineties, we started
Speaker 1: to see the introduction of what was then called wide
Speaker 1: screen television. We just call them TVs today because it's
Speaker 1: the standard format, but they had a different aspect ratio.
Speaker 1: Their aspect ratio was sixteen to nine. That means there's
Speaker 1: a bigger difference between height and width, right, The width
Speaker 1: is wider now than it changed more than the height did.
Speaker 1: And you could think about that, like if you multiplied
Speaker 1: four to three by three, it would be twelve to nine.
Speaker 1: But we're not talking twelve to nine. We're talking sixteen
Speaker 1: to nine. So the width changed more than the height did.
Speaker 1: That's when we get the wide screens. That's also going
Speaker 1: to affect how we talk about resolution. The introduction of
Speaker 1: computer displays complicated matters considerably because televisions followed a fairly
Speaker 1: standardized path. They had to. It was a necessity because
Speaker 1: they needed to be able to show broadcast television and
Speaker 1: cable television and these followed. So the televisions that we
Speaker 1: bought needed to be able to display those standards and
Speaker 1: make it a good experience. So, while there was nothing
Speaker 1: inherently requiring televisions to all follow the exact same you know,
Speaker 1: measurements and everything or aspect ratios. It was important that
Speaker 1: they did so, otherwise you would end up with like
Speaker 1: weird bars along the sides or top and bottom of
Speaker 1: images so that they would fit your screen, and people
Speaker 1: typically don't like those so much. So we're again, we're
Speaker 1: going to focus primarily on televisions. But you know, computer
Speaker 1: displays didn't have those restrictions, so computer displays have come
Speaker 1: in all sorts of different shapes and aspect ratios and
Speaker 1: thus also resolutions. So the reason we're going to focus
Speaker 1: on televisions is because if we tried to do it
Speaker 1: with computer displays, it would we'd be here for weeks,
Speaker 1: and some of them reference like a display that was
Speaker 1: used for a couple of years and hasn't been used since,
Speaker 1: and it would make no sense to even really spend
Speaker 1: time on it. So with televisions, we typically start discussions
Speaker 1: by talking about standard definition TV. You technically could go
Speaker 1: back further than that, but there's no real point in
Speaker 1: doing it, so don't ask me to do it. Besides,
Speaker 1: I've already done episodes where I talk about the history
Speaker 1: of TV and kind of talked about this. Also, I'm
Speaker 1: out of coffee, so I'm a little cranky today, so
Speaker 1: you know, it's just getting grouchy, Jonathan, I'm sorry. So
Speaker 1: standard definition really came in two formats, and they followed
Speaker 1: two different technologies. They were different enough to be incompatible,
Speaker 1: and what you got depended upon where you lived. So
Speaker 1: for folks who lived in places like the United States,
Speaker 1: we had standard Definition TV that was at four eighty I.
Speaker 1: The I in this case stands for interlaced. That gets
Speaker 1: into a related but arguably tangential territory. So I'm just
Speaker 1: going to stick with the resolution. But if you were
Speaker 1: in England, then you had the PAL format and that
Speaker 1: had five seventy six I resolution, So for eighty in
Speaker 1: the US five seventy six in the UK. Technically PAL
Speaker 1: crammed more pixels onto the screen. It also had a
Speaker 1: different frame rate from US or in TSC based tv U.
Speaker 1: These formats are largely obsolete today. Obviously, if you watch
Speaker 1: older content made for television, you're going to see that
Speaker 1: reflected in both image quality and aspect ratio. The numbers
Speaker 1: there indicate the number of lines that made up images
Speaker 1: on the screen, and we're talking lines from the top
Speaker 1: of the screen to the bottom or from the bottom
Speaker 1: to the top if you prefer. So, we're talking about
Speaker 1: the height of the display, So four eighty means there's
Speaker 1: four hundred eighty lines. Five seventy six means there's five
Speaker 1: hundred seventy six line. Uh, And thus the five to
Speaker 1: seventy six format is putting more image into a displays,
Speaker 1: cramming more lines of image. So if we were talking
Speaker 1: about digital, we would say by taking a four to
Speaker 1: three aspect ratio television and old style TV showing standard
Speaker 1: definition TV, if we were thinking of it as digital,
Speaker 1: we would say it was four eighty by six forty.
Speaker 1: That's what you get. Would you take the four eighty
Speaker 1: height and you put it through that four to three ratio.
Speaker 1: Remember the three in the four to three is the height,
Speaker 1: So it's four eighty tall and six forty wide five
Speaker 1: seventy six. If we did the same thing, would be
Speaker 1: five seventy six tall and seventy seven hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: eight wide. Again, assuming that you're using square pixels, that
Speaker 1: also would change things. But we're trying to keep this
Speaker 1: as symbol as possible. Now, that's if we were talking
Speaker 1: digital information with the standard definition, we wouldn't be Typically
Speaker 1: we'd be talking about analog television, that's a very different thing.
Speaker 1: We would still be talking about lines, but we wouldn't
Speaker 1: be talking about pixels so much. It's a different way
Speaker 1: of going about creating an image. So pixels gets a
Speaker 1: little muddled in that context, not that it really matters
Speaker 1: for our discussion because we're talking about largely obsolete technologies.
Speaker 1: But when you get up to enhanced definition television, the
Speaker 1: resolutions actually become four eighty by seven twenty and five
Speaker 1: seventy six by seven to twenty. So you might say, well,
Speaker 1: why why seven twenty Why is the width standard but
Speaker 1: the height different. Well, the answer to that is a
Speaker 1: little complicated and also largely moot, and so I'm not
Speaker 1: going to go into it because it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1: It's not something that you would commonly encounter today. That
Speaker 1: again was standard definition that was in the before times,
Speaker 1: and then high definition would bring new resolutions into the picture,
Speaker 1: so to speak, and also a change to the sixteen
Speaker 1: to nine aspect ratio that would have a large impact
Speaker 1: as well. So once we got to HDTV, the lowest
Speaker 1: resolution for HDTV was seven twenty P. So the P
Speaker 1: in this case stands for progressive scan. That's the alternative
Speaker 1: to interlace. Right, we talked about four eighty I and
Speaker 1: five seventy six I seven twenty P progressive scan progressive
Speaker 1: versus interlace. We're still talking about the height of the
Speaker 1: screen when we use that number seven to twenty P.
Speaker 1: So a seven to twenty P HDTV has seven hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty vertical pixels. If we were to measure the
Speaker 1: width of the screen in pixels, we would count one thousand,
Speaker 1: two hundred eighty pixels across. You got to multiply both
Speaker 1: of those to get the full number of pixels that
Speaker 1: are on the display. Right, the height times the width,
Speaker 1: that'll give us nine hundred two twenty one thousand, six
Speaker 1: hundred pixels. That's how many pixels make up a seven
Speaker 1: to twenty P HDTV image. Now, a step up from
Speaker 1: seven to twenty P was ten eighty P. We also
Speaker 1: had ten eighty I, which was arguably a step up
Speaker 1: because it was a higher resolution, and I say arguably
Speaker 1: because of the differences between interlaced and progressive scan. But
Speaker 1: again that gets into a different technology. So a ten
Speaker 1: eighty screen shows images that are one thousand and eighty
Speaker 1: pixels tall. So we're still talking about the vertical here,
Speaker 1: and then for with we're talking one thousand, nine hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty pixels wide, So you multiply those two together
Speaker 1: and you get more than two million pixels on display,
Speaker 1: so more than twice as many of a seven to
Speaker 1: twenty p display. So you're really cramming those pixels in there.
Speaker 1: Of course, we're only just getting started. Also, this is
Speaker 1: at the point where the television industry did something silly.
Speaker 1: So again, up to this point, when we're talking numbers,
Speaker 1: what we're describing is the number of vertical pixels in
Speaker 1: a column, right, how tall the image is in pixels.
Speaker 1: That's what we've been talking about with standard definition and
Speaker 1: high definition. But then we get into the ultra high
Speaker 1: definition territories and we suddenly stop looking at the vertical
Speaker 1: side of the equation and we look at the horizontal
Speaker 1: the width. So ten eighty would mean one thousand and
Speaker 1: eighty vertical pixels. But when we hit UHD, we do
Speaker 1: the flippy floppy, and we talk about the pixels that
Speaker 1: are across rather than the ones that go up and down.
Speaker 1: So let's say that you were talking about a two
Speaker 1: K display. Technically two K really references resolutions that are
Speaker 1: somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand pixels wide. That
Speaker 1: means you could actually call a ten eighty P television
Speaker 1: a two K television because yes, it's one thousand eighty
Speaker 1: pixels tall, but it is one thousand, nine hundred twenty
Speaker 1: pixels wide. One nine hundred and twenty is practically two thousand,
Speaker 1: So a ten adp TV is technically also a two
Speaker 1: K TV. This helps because there was never a formal
Speaker 1: definition of two K. There are other technologies that create
Speaker 1: two K images, like cameras, and they can have different resolutions, right,
Speaker 1: like it could be two thousand, five hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: pixels wide as opposed to one nine hundred and twenty,
Speaker 1: But that's cameras, not displays. Really, we typically skip over
Speaker 1: two K we go straight to four K, and a
Speaker 1: four K UHD screen has three thousand, eight hundred and
Speaker 1: forty pixels across, so that's what we're referencing. When we
Speaker 1: say four K, we're actually talking about three thousand, eight
Speaker 1: hundred and forty and it's two thousand and one hundred
Speaker 1: sixty pixels vertically. So if we had used the old
Speaker 1: HDTV classification instead of saying four K, we would call
Speaker 1: it twenty one sixty, right, because we went from ten eighty.
Speaker 1: Now we'd go to twenty one sixty. But for some reason,
Speaker 1: the industry decided instead to switch this up to width
Speaker 1: rather than height, So we talk four K. If we
Speaker 1: go up to eight K, then we're talking about seven thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred eighty pixels wide and four three hundred twenty
Speaker 1: pixels tall. So again, if we were using the old classification,
Speaker 1: we'd call it a forty three to twenty television. So
Speaker 1: as we get higher in resolution, we also see that
Speaker 1: screens are cramming more and more pixels in there. Like,
Speaker 1: the number doesn't have to go up a whole lot
Speaker 1: in either direction for the total number of pixels to
Speaker 1: go to crazy amounts. I mean, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: millions and millions of pixels at this point, and like
Speaker 1: I said, depending upon stuff like the size of the
Speaker 1: display and how far away you are from it, that
Speaker 1: may or may not make a difference. If you've got
Speaker 1: the cash to PLoP down for a luxury Samsung display,
Speaker 1: you know that one hundred and forty six to one,
Speaker 1: which I think will cost you like half a million
Speaker 1: dollars or maybe a quarter million something like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's way more than I could ever ever pay. Then
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're probably not gonna sit so close
Speaker 1: that you're fogging up the glass, but you're gonna want
Speaker 1: a pretty high resolution for that. But if you're again,
Speaker 1: if you're looking at something that's in the probably the
Speaker 1: forty to fifty inch range, I could see you going
Speaker 1: as high as four K, depending on how far away
Speaker 1: you're sitting. But even that, to me feels like overkilled.
Speaker 1: But you also have to keep in mind I'm talking
Speaker 1: about my experience with my vision, which is probably not
Speaker 1: as good as yours. So it's it's entirely possible that
Speaker 1: you could immediately tell the difference between HD and UHD
Speaker 1: from resolution alone. I'm not here to say that there
Speaker 1: is no difference. You might be able to spotted immediately,
Speaker 1: even on smaller screens, but for someone like me, it
Speaker 1: doesn't make much sense. Okay, we're going to take another break.
Speaker 1: When we come back, I'm gonna talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about computer displays, because, as I said, that makes things
Speaker 1: oh way more complicated. So computers and their displays. The
Speaker 1: earliest personal computers mostly relied on televisions to serve as monitors,
Speaker 1: like you would actually hook up a television one that
Speaker 1: you're presumably not using for anything else to your computer. Now,
Speaker 1: later on models would have their own monitor. Often in
Speaker 1: early computers, the monitor was incorporated into the body of
Speaker 1: the computer itself, so it wasn't like you would go
Speaker 1: and buy a display and then a computer and then
Speaker 1: pair them together. They would be one and the same.
Speaker 1: Eventually we would get standalone displays that could be used
Speaker 1: with different types of computers as long as the connections
Speaker 1: were standardized between the two. Right, and there are many, many,
Speaker 1: many graphics formats that affected everything from resolution to aspect ratios,
Speaker 1: far too many for us to go into, because if
Speaker 1: we did, honestly, this episode would just become a numbers station.
Speaker 1: You know, one of those radio signals where if you
Speaker 1: pick it up, there's this creepy music playing in the background,
Speaker 1: and then a voice comes over the air and just
Speaker 1: starts reading out a string of numbers, and then the
Speaker 1: music plays again, and then it repeats. Well, I don't
Speaker 1: have any creepy music to play in the background, so
Speaker 1: I can't pull that off. So I'm just going to
Speaker 1: talk about the most common screen resolutions that we use today, Like,
Speaker 1: we could be talking about stuff like three twenty by
Speaker 1: two hundred from way back in the day, but that
Speaker 1: makes no sense, So I'm gonna use stat counter. And
Speaker 1: I'm also talking about displays for desktops. Obviously, if we
Speaker 1: talk about things like laptop computers or mobile devices, that's
Speaker 1: another matter entirely and would require a different episode. So
Speaker 1: let's say you've got yourself a desktop computer. What are
Speaker 1: the most common screen resolutions in use currently? Well, according
Speaker 1: to stat counter, the most common resolution in use today
Speaker 1: is nineteen twenty by ten eighty that's the equivalent of
Speaker 1: HDTV ten eighty HDTV Right, nineteen twenty by ten eighty pixels.
Speaker 1: Following that, you've got thirteen sixty six by seven sixty eight.
Speaker 1: After that is fifteen thirty six by eight sixty four.
Speaker 1: So that's interesting, right, Like, the most popular is the
Speaker 1: equivalent of HDTV. The second most popular is you know,
Speaker 1: a step down. The third most popular is a slight
Speaker 1: step in between the two. I thought thought that was interesting.
Speaker 1: Number four would be twelve eighty by seven twenty. That's
Speaker 1: the equivalent of seven to twenty p television. But none
Speaker 1: of that marks the top end of computer resolutions. Those
Speaker 1: are just the most commonly used, and this is just
Speaker 1: based on pulling data from folks going to different websites
Speaker 1: and stuff, because web pages need to render properly on
Speaker 1: a screen, and so you get that information by collecting
Speaker 1: all the data on the back end. It's yet another
Speaker 1: data point that gets collected about us as we use
Speaker 1: our technologies. So if you're going on the slightly higher
Speaker 1: end of resolutions, that still are They're not common, but
Speaker 1: they're more frequently used than the top top of the line,
Speaker 1: mostly along the lines of people who are in creative
Speaker 1: industries like video editing or image production, or they're the
Speaker 1: gamer types. Then you might get up to around twenty
Speaker 1: five sixty to fourteen four These are also known as
Speaker 1: fourteen forty P resolution monitors. That's less common. It's it's
Speaker 1: higher quality, but it is not even close to the
Speaker 1: top of the line because you you do have five
Speaker 1: K and even eight K monitors available on the market.
Speaker 1: Not only that, but computer displays can actually be other
Speaker 1: aspect ratios besides sixteen to nine. You know, that's the
Speaker 1: standard for televisions, but there's no rule that says computer
Speaker 1: monitors have to follow that same aspect ratio, So there
Speaker 1: are ultra wide monitors that have a twenty one by
Speaker 1: nine aspect ratio. In fact, that's allowing for the possibility
Speaker 1: of ten K monitors where you have a display that's
Speaker 1: four thousand, something like four three hundred and twenty pixels
Speaker 1: tall and then a crazy amount wide because it's a
Speaker 1: twenty nine twenty one to nine aspect ratio. With a
Speaker 1: monitor that wide, you can actually create the equivalent of
Speaker 1: a dual monitor set up, but with just one screen. Right,
Speaker 1: you just designate one part of the screen to serve
Speaker 1: for something and the rest of the screen to serve
Speaker 1: for something else, and you don't need two screens because
Speaker 1: your monitor is so wide. You can do it in
Speaker 1: one go, and the resolution is so high that you
Speaker 1: can do it without the details suffering in the process.
Speaker 1: You can divide up your screen to serve different purposes. Now,
Speaker 1: as I said early on, resolution is really just one
Speaker 1: part of what makes a good image. You do need
Speaker 1: higher resolution if you want something to look nice and smooth,
Speaker 1: particularly if you're doing something like using a very large
Speaker 1: display close to you, like you would if you're like
Speaker 1: video editing or whatever, and particularly if it's a very
Speaker 1: large display you need to have that higher resolution, but
Speaker 1: there are other elements that are at least as important
Speaker 1: and sometimes arguably more important than resolution in order to
Speaker 1: get a great image on your screen. So stuff like
Speaker 1: brightness matters, contrast, which is the difference between the brightest
Speaker 1: and the darkest colors that your display can show. The
Speaker 1: greater degrees of difference you can have between the brightest
Speaker 1: brights and the darkest dark colors, the better color representation
Speaker 1: is really important too. You want those colors to be accurate.
Speaker 1: You want what you see on your screen to accurately
Speaker 1: reflect whatever the end output is going to be, right,
Speaker 1: So if your monitor can't do that, and you're working
Speaker 1: on something that's going to be displayed in some other format,
Speaker 1: then it may be that what you get out doesn't
Speaker 1: look like what you put in because you have this
Speaker 1: disparity between the two. Refresh Rate also matters. The refresh
Speaker 1: rate is how frequently the screen actually refreshes the image
Speaker 1: on display. So with video, the higher the refresh rate
Speaker 1: typically the smoother the motion is on screen. That doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean that higher refresh rates are automatically better. They
Speaker 1: can be for things like if you're, you know, playing games,
Speaker 1: and you want to have a really smooth experience, Yes,
Speaker 1: but if you're watching something on screen and it has
Speaker 1: a super high refresh rate on your on your media
Speaker 1: and your monitor, it can be distracting. It can create
Speaker 1: that effect people talk about where it kind of creates
Speaker 1: the the what they call it the Mexican soap opera effect.
Speaker 1: Everything looks a little too smooth, the motions are too smooth,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't feel right because the way that traditional
Speaker 1: television and film has kind of trained us, we see
Speaker 1: moving images having different qualities than what we get if
Speaker 1: we have a really high refresh rate. So I know
Speaker 1: a lot of people who when they get a new
Speaker 1: television that has the option for a high refresh rate,
Speaker 1: one of the first things they do is that down
Speaker 1: because otherwise it makes everything look weird, unless you're talking
Speaker 1: about sports, which makes it look crazy awesome. So like
Speaker 1: for specific applications that high refresh rate is a good thing,
Speaker 1: for others, it may be more distracting than good. And
Speaker 1: there's still other elements like HDR, which is high dynamic range.
Speaker 1: This kind of gets into luminosity or brightness, and specifically
Speaker 1: with relation to color representation, that gets really complicated. It's
Speaker 1: not helped by the fact that the industry often will
Speaker 1: push out a technology before that technology is standardized. So
Speaker 1: what that means ultimately is that you can have media
Speaker 1: that supports one approach toward HDR and hardware that supports
Speaker 1: a different approach to HDR. The two are not necessarily compatible,
Speaker 1: which means while technically you have the hardware to produce
Speaker 1: HDR images and the software or media to create them,
Speaker 1: because of that lack of compatibility, you can't actually experience.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that the media won't necessarily play, you
Speaker 1: just won't be able to take advantage of that particular feature,
Speaker 1: and then you're paying money for something that you can't
Speaker 1: actually use in that particular instance. We've seen similar things,
Speaker 1: by the way, with surround sound, where you could have
Speaker 1: a surround sound system that supports certain protocols but not others,
Speaker 1: which means you can't be certain just by putting media
Speaker 1: into the system that you're going to be able to
Speaker 1: enjoy the full capabilities of it. It has to be compatible.
Speaker 1: That's the issue with standardization, Like you want to have
Speaker 1: standardization so that way you don't have to think about
Speaker 1: these things. You know, you just go out and get
Speaker 1: what you want, and you play it on what you want,
Speaker 1: and you get the best experience that the two can
Speaker 1: offer you without making any concessions. Unfortunately, that's not necessarily
Speaker 1: where we are, so we often have to do a
Speaker 1: little extra research to make sure that we're getting what
Speaker 1: we want. So that is kind of a round up
Speaker 1: on resolutions. It falls very similarly along the lines of megapixels.
Speaker 1: When digital cameras first became a thing, megapixels was like
Speaker 1: the one and only way that manufacturers were using to
Speaker 1: differentiate their product from others, and essentially they were saying
Speaker 1: more megapixels equals more better, and if it had a
Speaker 1: higher number for megapixels, then it meant better pictures, which
Speaker 1: is not necessarily the case. It does mean that you
Speaker 1: have higher resolution images, but at a certain point that
Speaker 1: stops to matter unless there's always none less unless you
Speaker 1: need to print the image on some enormous format, in
Speaker 1: which case you need that high resolution in order to
Speaker 1: not have a big drop in quality once you scale
Speaker 1: the image up to whatever size you're actually printing at.
Speaker 1: But for most people, not a big deal. Same thing
Speaker 1: I think with display resolutions. For most people, I don't
Speaker 1: think you need to go overkill on resolution. Also, I
Speaker 1: didn't really touch on this, but when we're talking about
Speaker 1: things like eight K televisions, there's a lack of media
Speaker 1: for eight K, right, there's a lack of actual support
Speaker 1: for eight K. So you might have an eight K display,
Speaker 1: but everything you're watching on it is four K or
Speaker 1: lower resolution. Maybe the display has the ability to upscale,
Speaker 1: but that's kind of like an artificial boost of resolution, right,
Speaker 1: it's computers interpreting what should be added to the image
Speaker 1: in order to create a higher resolution. It's not the
Speaker 1: true capture of whatever that thing was. So again, I
Speaker 1: think that going into it knowing these things and knowing
Speaker 1: the limitations is good. Maybe in your case, maybe you've
Speaker 1: got eagle eyes and you're looking for an enormous television
Speaker 1: and eight K is absolutely what you want. You want
Speaker 1: a future proof it because you can already tell the
Speaker 1: difference between four K and everything else, and it stands
Speaker 1: out to you. Then it matters to you. If you're
Speaker 1: like me, it probably doesn't. I keep getting tempted to
Speaker 1: get a ultra high definition television because I'm listen. I
Speaker 1: use a TV until it stops working. So my televisions
Speaker 1: are still in the HDTV range, but I can't really
Speaker 1: tell the difference that much. Maybe slightly, but not enough
Speaker 1: for it to really matter. The only reason I would
Speaker 1: go to ultra high definition is if I were purchasing
Speaker 1: media that was in the ultra high definition format that
Speaker 1: had features on it that I wanted. So in other words,
Speaker 1: if I'm going out and buying a UHD copy of
Speaker 1: a movie and the reason I'm doing is because there's
Speaker 1: behind the scenes commentary and stuff like that that I
Speaker 1: can't get in other formats, then yes, I would want
Speaker 1: to have the hardware to be able to play that
Speaker 1: particular media. But you know, most people have gotten away
Speaker 1: from physical media. I've just started to get back into
Speaker 1: it because I got tired of stuff on streaming disappearing
Speaker 1: and not being able to watch it anymore. So having
Speaker 1: a physical copy is helpful in that case, but you
Speaker 1: have to have a you know, the space and equipment
Speaker 1: to play it. All right, I'm rambling. That's it for
Speaker 1: this what was going to be a text of tidbits
Speaker 1: on resolution. I know that I rambled like usual, so
Speaker 1: it's not really a tidbits episode. I hope you are
Speaker 1: all well and I'll talk to you again. Really soon.
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